Ten little feet stomped in unison inside the library at Frankie Woods McCullough Academy, and a loud chant started.
“Can you read like the cougars read, can you write like the cougars write? Can you roll like the cougars roll?” asked the elementary school’s cheerleaders, facing a crowd of students, parents, and educators.
“I don’t think so!” the cheerleaders quickly shouted.
It was an empowering chant for other students at the Gary school, where a March Madness-themed reading celebration took place on Tuesday. Books about sports were given away, parents got tips for supporting their kids’ reading journeys, and the school’s mascot, Curtis the Cougar, even made a special appearance.
These monthly Roar for Reading events have been a staple of the Gary Community School Corporation since autumn, with a simple mission: get kids reading.
But putting books in their hands is only half the battle.
Last week, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a law that tightens up how reading skills are taught, how students who need more assistance are identified, and how schools should proceed when a student doesn’t pass the state reading exam, IREAD — which includes having them remain in third grade.
The Indiana Department of Education revealed in December that thousands of third-graders were advancing to fourth grade without passing IREAD, and state legislators came to session in January with literacy top of mind. SB 1, the bill Holcomb signed last week, came out of that focus.
Lori Johnson-Kuykendall runs the Gary Literacy Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing literacy in the city. She said the U.S. is in a “state of crisis” when it comes to reading. Locally, she’s observed how difficult it is for people to meet their basic needs without a foundation of literacy.
Still, Johnson-Kuykendall doesn’t think holding kids back is the solution to low literacy rates and poor reading scores. Instead, she argued, the solution lies within early education and how children are being taught before reaching third grade, she said. She questions why the state’s mandatory schooling age begins at 7, rather than 5, for example.
“If we’re not going to ramp up and intensify efforts as a precursor, then we are kind of punishing those children that don’t meet that performance indicator, which at some point is no fault of their own,” she said.
Potential for disproportionate impact in Gary
Many educators agree that addressing literacy through legislation is important, but they are worried about the use of retention to do that.
Studies on the effects of repeating a grade offer mixed conclusions, with some connecting it to a higher chance of dropping out of school and others showing a lower need for remediation efforts in the future. Research is clear on one thing, though: Black children are more likely to be held back than children of other races.
In Gary, where the vast majority of school-age children are Black, the law could have a disproportionate impact. Only one of the 14 schools in the city where third grade is offered had an IREAD passage rate above the state average of 81.9%.
Last school year, about 1 in 2 students promoted to fourth grade by GCSC did not pass the test, compared to 1 in 6 across the state.
And while the state has seen an uptick in the promotion rate of students who didn’t pass IREAD over the past decade, the increase has been especially pronounced in Gary public schools.
From 2013 to 2023, the rate jumped from 1.3% to 49.5% at GCSC, according to IDOE data. The state’s overall promotion rate rose, too, over that span, but it was less extreme, going from 4.1% to 16.8%.
District responses to the new law
Gary resident Tiara Moore, who attended the Roar for Reading event Tuesday, said she struggled with testing anxiety, which led to her having to repeat a grade during high school. Today, as a parent of elementary and middle school students, she still feels conflicted about standardized testing.
Fortunately, Moore said, her third-grade daughter passed IREAD while she was in second grade, which meant she didn’t have to retake it.
Her younger children enjoy reading, she said, and were the ones to tell her about Tuesday’s Roar for Reading event. To parents helping their children learn to read, Moore said to ensure they retain information they read and aren’t “reading just to read.”
Schools need to begin the practices laid out in SB 1 starting in August, but some in Gary have already adopted new measures of their own to boost students’ reading skills.
Mavis Snelson, GCSC’s deputy manager, wrote in an email to Capital B Gary that improving literacy was the focal point of the district this year.
Snelson wrote that teachers have undergone training and schools have literacy coaches through a state program called the Literacy Cadre, which provides support to districts on the science of reading, something all schools must follow starting in August. Also, students in second through fourth grade attend 30-minute virtual tutoring lessons three times a week, she wrote.
Lake Ridge New Tech Schools, the other public school district in Gary, is a member of the Literacy Cadre as well, said Assistant Superintendent Cynthia Mose-Trevino. At the district’s lone elementary school, Longfellow New Tech, she said an eight-step process is employed to ensure that reading comprehension is baked into the curriculum of other subjects and that tests that mirror the format of IREAD are taken to prepare students.
Snelson and Mose-Trevino said their respective districts are working on other programming in response to SB 1. For Lake Ridge, that means holding a more robust summer school, and for GCSC, that means providing extra interventions during and after school as well as the summer.
Capital B Gary reached out to every district or school in the city and did not receive responses from any charter or private schools.
To any parents concerned about their children having to repeat third grade, Mose-Trevino acknowledged that possibility. However, she said that the district is more interested in the root cause of low literacy rates, which she, like Johnson-Kuykendall, traces back to early education.
“It’s an equity issue. They’re not given equitable access to preschool, and so that’s what should be the concern of parents,” Mose-Trevino said.
She said the district is looking into what funding could be used to potentially open preschool classrooms. A big help for schools since the COVID-19 pandemic began has been ESSER, or Emergency and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding, which will end in September. Mose-Trevino said the question now becomes how can they maintain positions like academic interventionists and aides that have been beneficial for students and teachers?
With SB 1 now coded into state law, Johnson-Kuykendall said she hopes more people are awakening to the “seriousness of the matter” around the country’s literacy crisis, and that parents become more involved in their children’s education.
“Learning doesn’t stop at school, and it doesn’t start there either,” she said.
Back at McCullough Academy’s Roar for Reading event, Moore, the parent of GCSC students, recalled a bit of her own reading journey. She remembered loving to read in elementary school but later falling out of the habit. That’s not what she wants to happen for her kids.
“I hope for them to want to read all [their] life,” she said.