Most of us already understand that English is hard. There are only 26 letters, but some make the same sound, some make different sounds when combined with other letters, and two words that sound the same can be spelled differently.
Student: “Can. Cat gets the kit, kit.”
Hedrick: “Think she can? Do you? Think she can get the kit?”
This first grader tested below-proficient in reading at the beginning of the school year. Now it’s December, and he’s getting it. The cat can get the kit.
And for his hard work, he gets a sticker, and some free time to play in the gym.
This is just a few minutes in the very long day of Jacquie Hedrick, the only remaining reading interventionist at Sitka’s Xóots Elementary School.
“I have 20 kids on my roster right now, and I’ve got eight other ones that I have our AmeriCorps working with. And we are just starting to figure out how we’re gonna start servicing kindergarten.”
Last year, there were two other interventionists at Xóots in addition to Hedrick, funded by a state grant from Alaska Reads. (One-time funds from the state to Sitka Schools for the 2023-24 school year totaled $884,000.)
Together, the three of them brought about an almost unimaginable turnaround in reading performance in first grade.
“At the beginning of the year (last year) 81% of our kindergartners were below, and then at the end of last year screening, 75% of them were above. So that’s dramatic results,” said Kim Babb, who headed up the reading intervention program at Xóots last year. Babb reported her data to the Sitka School Board in the spring, and the entire room did a double-take. A near-total reversal in reading proficiency in one school year. I recalled the moment with Babb, and Xóots principal Jill Lecrone.
KCAW: “I thought you were going to pop open a bottle of champagne at that school board meeting.”
Babb: (Laughing) “That’s right, I was! It was amazing. We were so impressed by our numbers. We really were.”
Lecrone: “There is nothing more exciting than to see kids learning to read in kindergarten, first, and second grade, because then they can choose whatever future they want. They can do anything.”
The team that produced those great results has been disbanded. With sweeping budget cuts to Alaska’s schools following the governor’s veto of the education bill (SB 140), Sitka was forced to lay off 13 teachers this year, and Babb was reassigned to teach Special Education. Xóots first graders are showing improvement, but they are not on track to achieve the same level of success as last year’s class.
Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, a former teacher, finds this especially frustrating – and familiar.
“And too often in Alaska – this is not the first time it’s happened – we find something, we ask our schools to do it, they exceed our expectations, and then we fail to figure out how to continue the funding that it would take for them to continue the success that they’re having,” Himschoot said.
Himschoot wasn’t in the legislature when the Alaska Reads Act passed in the spring of 2022. She was an elementary school teacher in Sitka. Alaska Reads has all the hallmarks of a conservative education bill: high expectations and limited funding that together seem almost designed to bring out the shortcomings of public education.
A political independent, Himschoot doesn’t agree that Alaska Reads is partisan policy, but it’s a lot more than a simple change of approach to literacy education, as some of her conservative colleagues have argued.
“There’s no Democrat, there’s no Independent, there’s no Republican who doesn’t want kids to read by third grade,” she said. “What becomes partisan is how we then support that. And so yes, we only asked the schools to do it a different way, but we also asked them to write an individual reading intervention plan for each child who wasn’t meeting the benchmarks. Who’s going to write those? We also asked them to tutor kids after school, who’s going to do that? We also asked for summer programming, who’s going to do that? So yes, we’re only asking them to do it differently, but we are asking them to do more. And when you ask for more, you have to be ready to pay for more.”
Beginning in January, Himschoot will co-chair the House Education Committee. Teachers and schools could not have a more sympathetic representative to champion their cause, but she says the legislature is complicated. Even a demonstrated success like Alaska Reads will run into headwinds.
“I’m incredibly proud of Sitka schools,” she said. “I’m incredibly proud of Petersburg schools. We’re having great outcomes in House District 2, but you could go into any school across the state, and you’re going to find hard-working educators, and you’re going to find them in there trying to make the Reads Act work against some pretty long odds and against obstacles that shouldn’t be there — like the lack of funding.”
Once they’ve completed first grade, Sitka students leave Xóots and go to Keet Gooshi Heen, which houses second through fifth grades. Keet also lost its two reading interventionists this year, and has none on staff now. (However, Keet has just opened a job posting within the district for a grant-funded Intervention Support position.) Alaska Reads provided literacy grants for classroom teachers to train in the Science of Reading program over the summer, and 35 Sitka teachers had earned their endorsements by last April. But it’s a heavy lift even teaching one child to read, much less an entire class.
Hedrick: “Read with me one more time, and then you can go get your sticker.”
Student: “The disk can spin.”
Hedrick: “High five!”
Student: “I learned part of it without even looking!”
Hedrick: “The only way it’s gonna get into that noggin, though, is if (whispering) you look at it. Go get your sticker, kiddo.”
The disk can spin. Like a lot of top-down educational policy, there really wasn’t much enthusiasm for the Alaska Reads Act when it first passed, but this school and others ran with it, and made it work. Now, Jill Lecrone and her staff would like nothing more than the chance to keep it working.
“The support that we had last year, our kids were thriving, not only on, you know, the reading… but social and emotionally, getting along with other kids, understanding how to take turns, what it meant to be a student,” Lecrone said. “And this year we see them in first grade and they are ready for first grade. And it was a lot of work. So we need to have the support to back up the Alaska Reads Act because it’s great: We all want kids to be reading because we know it’s so important, but we need the money to provide all the interventionists and the supports we need.”
Alaska’s next legislative session opens in January, the start of a fresh debate about education funding. In Sitka, Alaska Reads may have been one the legislature’s best ideas, but without money, teachers can’t invest the time in bringing individual students up to grade level. The cat won’t get the kit, and the disk can’t spin.
