The deadline for Atlanta’s new school superintendent, Bryan Johnson, to deliver a plan for his first 100 days is next week, but there’s already a clue about what might be one of his top priorities.
$11.8 million of Atlanta Public Schools’ recently passed $1.8 billion annual budget is dedicated to literacy initiatives, a nod to the imperative the district has placed on improving reading levels among its roughly 50,000 students. In 2022, only 25% of APS eighth grade students were reading at proficient level, according to a report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Literacy rates have been stagnant for nearly three decades in the district, even as graduation rates rose to 86% for the class of 2023.
“It’s not just the district that’s struggling with literacy,” said Comer Yates, executive director of the Rollins Center at Atlanta Speech School. Yates oversees the Literacy and Justice for All program that APS has been piloting in some of its schools.
“It’s a city or community that has denied children access to educational opportunity for the most unfair, unconscionable reasons possible, and realizing that to break that cycle, you have to bring forces, resources, and precision to the effort that exceed the forces that have denied their children and their parents.”
To address the issue, APS plans to spend heavily to ensure literacy coaches are available for students in each of its 55 elementary schools. It will also spend an additional $9 million for special education services and $7.8 million for support-level positions.
At the center of the effort is the literacy program that Yates runs. It was modeled after a pilot program in Marietta City Schools. APS plans to use what it learned from those efforts to inform its new literacy program, Readers Are Leaders, which is expected to roll out this upcoming school year, according to APS’ chief academic officer, Sherri Forrest.
“We met with the principals at our schools featuring the Literacy and Justice for All program, and they were able to share with us things that they thought were working well and the things they thought could have been better,” Forrest told Capital B Atlanta. “One of the biggest things they said is they would centralize some of the work sooner, so that everybody was doing the same work.”
Forrest says the high price tag is necessary to ensure that APS students are reading on grade level. As the 2024-2025 school year approaches, she says the district is planning to utilize the last remaining year of its Literacy and Justice for All grant to roll the program out to all pre-kindergarten programs in the district, with the goal of ensuring phonemic awareness is present as early as possible.
“If we can build our pre-K students’ strengths in phonemic awareness before they come to kindergarten, it makes them so much stronger,” Forrest said.
Readers Are Leaders is designed around what educators call five pillars of the science of reading — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Phonemic awareness describes the ability to recognize and work with the individual sounds, known as phonemes, of spoken words. That also refers to the ability to manipulate, combine, delete, and replace sounds within words.
APS’ new literacy program is also tied to the passage of House Bill 538, known as the Georgia Early Literacy Act, which requires districts to fund training for kindergarten through third grade teachers in the science of reading.
Passed by the Georgia General Assembly in February, the law requires public school districts across the state to provide annual reports to the Georgia Department of Education to ensure that funding for high-quality instructional materials are approved in fiscal budgets.
Lisa Morgan, Georgia Association of Educators president, said teacher training will be key to the success of any literacy effort.
“One of the concerns that I hear a lot from classroom teachers is when the programs are adopted is number one, is the training adequate, clear and specific?” said Morgan, a kindergarten teacher in DeKalb County Schools. “Who is teaching the material? One of the frustrations we have, a lot of the time, is that the training is sometimes coming from representatives, or those who have not been in a classroom in a while.”
The ultimate goal was to find a way to bring a literacy initiative that centers the science of reading in every Atlanta elementary school, Forrest said.
To accomplish that, Yates said the school board and its newly hired superintendent have to be on the same page.
“If it’s not a collective effort, it has no chance of succeeding,” he said.
