Waseca Public Schools sees positive results from READ Act

While the passing of the Minnesota Reading to Ensure Academic Development (READ) Act was met with some criticism when it came to timeline and budget, Waseca Public Schools leaders say they've already seen growth from its students because of it.

Waseca Superintendent Eric Hudspith discussed the READ Act with the School Board at their April 4 meeting. Some teachers have already implemented reading strategies from the act in their classrooms, and the district is reporting improvement from students.

The act was passed and signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz in May 2023. The goal of the law was to have every Minnesota child reading at or above grade level every year.

The law set specific expectations of how teachers in the state of Minnesota will be expected to teach reading in their classrooms. Teachers will have to go through specific training and learn certain strategies, in order to teach reading to students.

The act has nothing to do with curriculum or standards, but rather teaching methods and strategies that have been proven to be the most effective in teaching students how to read and improve literacy. The state decided that the strategies chosen for the act will be the best plan for all schools in the state.

"This is something that Brooke [McGuire] and the team have been on for years, and we actually had staff already through this training before this even came down the pike," Hudspith said. "It is good literacy instruction."

McGuire is Waseca's director of teaching and learning and has played the lead role in the process of implementing the new strategies with staff.

The act requires teachers to go through 90 hours of literacy training, which Hudspith noted was one of the problem areas of the legislation.

"There were really some flaws in how it's laid out," said Hudspith. "The good news for us in Waseca is that again, Brooke and the team were already on it, so we had teachers starting the training. It wasn't something that came out of left field for our staff."

While Hudspith feels the READ Act will make a positive difference overall, it had some flaws when it came to the timeline of the training for the teachers and the budget for the training.

"It has the potential to get a little bit of a negative spin, because they didn't fund it enough and they didn't put enough reasonable timelines into the implementation," said Hudspith.

To cover the costs of the training for teachers, McGuire was able to secure $300,000 in grants for the district. The district is also able to provide time for teachers to work on their training during professional days.

"We're trying to get people as much time on the professional days as possible to work on that," McGuire said.

Hudspith noted while he is not concerned about training the staff that the district has now; he is concerned about when they have to turn over staff and have to train three or four new teachers every year.

The training for the new strategies is through the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system does not have access to it at the moment.

While he has some questions and concerns, Hudspith does believe the act will benefit students in literacy in the long run, as the district is already seeing results.

"I cannot speak highly enough of our teachers and how they have handled this," he said. "This is a lot of work, and some of our teachers have to basically change the way they teach reading significantly."

"I have a couple teachers who are cruising and are way ahead of schedule," McGuire added. "When I talked to them about it, they just said 'It's so good; it's information I wish I had years ago,' and so they are appreciating it and flying through it."

Board member Julie Anderson respected that the Minnesota Legislature wanted to have the entire state be taught reading in a similar matter, but she noted that they could have provided more money to the schools to make it happen.

Hudspith agreed with Anderson and added that he has seen reading strategies come and go over time, and the strategies that are being implemented with the act are great ones.

"I've been in classrooms and seeing some of this instruction reminds me more of some of the good direct instruction that I just remember experiencing in becoming a good reader … so I feel pretty good about it," Hudspith said.

Board Chair Dave Dunn asked why the state implementing set strategies for the whole state is happening now as opposed to five years ago. Hudspith said that the reason it's happening now is because there has been an excessive learning loss and student recovery after the pandemic.

Many people in education have wondered where students would be in their learning if the pandemic hadn't disrupted the system. The state hopes that the learning methods in the act will help in moving on from that.

Since the pandemic, reading scores around the state have dropped, and Hudspith thinks the cause of this is because of the pandemic and the reading strategies used in the past few years. That's why he's excited about potential solutions, like what the READ Act offers.

"I refuse to think that our kids are not capable. We have some pretty smart kids," Hudspith said. "Our kids aren't getting less capable."