Although it emerged under a different bill number and took the legislative long way around, a form of the Third Grade Success Act finally passed at the 11th hour of this year’s regular West Virginia legislative session.
With less than a half hour on the clock Saturday night, the Senate unanimously approved House Bill 3035, a bill that had made multiple rounds between committees and legislative bodies under different names.
If signed into law by Gov. Jim Justice, HB 3035 would call for reading instruction to be based on the science of reading concepts and phonics, as opposed to memorization and contextualization practices.
The idea of reemphasizing systematic phonics-based instruction has been gaining steam since West Virginia fourth- and eighth-graders hit their lowest mark in more than two decades of comparable data on the U.S. Department of Education’s 2022 NAEP Assessment.
West Virginia Board of Education officials have been receiving regular reports from the state Department of Education’s “Ready, Read, Write” program, which has piloted the process of implementing phonics-based instruction into classrooms.
According to a 2020 EdWeek Research Center report, more than 70% of U.S. teachers utilized a balanced approach of reading instruction with “some phonics.”
“The ability to read is really something that many of us take for granted and we know that students who struggle to read or maybe don’t learn to read, they often grow up to be adults who struggle,” state schools Deputy Superintendent Sara Lewis-Stankus said during the Board of Education’s February meeting. “And a child who struggles to read faces so many challenges in adulthood. We could be intervening in that as educators.”
In an example of the approach’s success, Mississippi saw the highest reading proficiency gains in the country after codifying phonics-based instruction back in 2013, jumping from 20% to 25% proficient in 2015.
“We really recognize this moment for the urgency it holds. We know that our students and the future of West Virginia depend on it,” Lewis-Stankus said at the meeting. “We all stand in agreement that we have to aggressively address the low student achievement in our state with diligence and resolve. The stakes are really far too high.”
To supplement the focus, the bill also would establish an accompanying system of support and intervention to monitor student progress toward grade-level literacy and numeracy proficiency by the end of the third grade.
That process would include screener and benchmark assessments in grades K-3, at the beginning, middle and end of the year.
Students exhibiting a substantial deficiency would operate under a personalized and research-based learning plan, with assessment results, plan information and resources/strategies to aid children communicated to parents. Students would remain under the plan until showing no deficiency.
And if made law, effective July 2026, students who fail to become grade-level proficient in literacy by the end of the third grade relative to the West Virginia College and Career Readiness Standards would be held back on teacher recommendation.
Several exemptions to retention could be made, including those for nonnative speakers and those with a learning disability. Parents also could formally request their child be promoted, despite results, with continued intervention work.
The bill also regulates class size and teacher’s aide requirements. The original fiscal note on Senate Bill 274, the Third Grade Success Act, calls for roughly $96 million to fund hiring an additional 2,491 early childhood classroom assistant teachers in first- through third-grade classrooms over a three-year phase-in period.
The language of the Third Grade Success Act contained in HB 3035 originally was proposed by Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, as SB 274.
A back-and-forth between the House Education Committee and the Senate floor began last Thursday, when the former gutted the system of literacy and numeracy interventions and supports for pre-K-3 students from SB 274 and replaced it with far narrower supports for those with dyslexia and dyscalculia.
The language they inserted was pulled from HB 3293, which had been awaiting attention in the Grady-chaired Senate Education Committee at the time.
The Senate responded Friday by gutting HB 3035, a similar bill proposed by House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, and House Minority Leader Doug Skaff, D-Kanawha, and replacing its contents with the text the House Education Committee had removed from SB 274.
Senators also approved rolling in elements of HB 3293, the learning disability bill the House Education Committee had stuffed into the gutted SB 274, as a means of hoping for compromise.
The Senate floor amendment to HB 3035 also removed provisions relating to the Grow Your Own Pathway program, a three-year pilot project currently offering accelerated pathways to becoming a teacher.
On Saturday, debate led to removal and reimplementation of various portions of the bill before a compromise was reached.
Skaff is the president of HD Media LLC, which owns the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
