House, Senate agree to extend bipartisan state literacy act

The Senate and House unanimously voted to extend the Virginia Literacy Act to students in fourth through eighth grade with the passage of a pair of bipartisan bills.

The Virginia Literacy Act, which unanimously passed both chambers of the assembly last year and will go into effect for the 2024-2025 school year, is aimed at boosting literacy rates for students in kindergarten through third grade. The act requires schools across the state to establish evidence-based reading intervention programs, a key component of which is hiring one reading specialist for every 550 students who oversees students’ literacy progress.

Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, and Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, both patroned the act last year but decided to propose HB 1526 and SB 1175 to expand it after the last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that Virginia’s fourth-graders performed below the national average in reading for the first time in 30 years and had the largest drop in the nation.

“Schools in Virginia are in the midst of a reading crisis,” Coyner wrote in a Jan. 15 op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “Those very same fourth-graders whose performance sounded the alarms of catastrophic learning loss need and deserve access to the evidence-based instruction they require.”

Lucas also emphasized that the students included in the current Virginia Literacy Act will be in the fourth grade by the time it takes effect and need more support.

“If we do not act then these children will enter school and classrooms that we know do not have the resources they need to teach them to read,” Lucas said while presenting the bill to the Senate Education and Health committee on Jan. 19.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been a vocal supporter of the implementation and expansion of the Virginia Literacy Act and recently visited a local elementary school to promote the bills.

“This is all being done on a bipartisan basis. Because there’s no disagreement, that when our children are equipped with, with the ability to read, then they can accomplish all kinds of things. So it’s a very exciting moment,” Youngkin said.

Despite Youngkin’s advocacy for the bills, his proposed budget for this fiscal year only provides funding to fully expand the Virginia Literacy Act through the fifth grade, Coyner’s bill passed with an amendment to provide one reading specialist for every 1,100 students in grades sixth through eighth. Lucas’s bill passed the Senate without any amendments.

Other supporters include representatives from local school districts, the Virginia State Literacy Association, CASA Virginia, Virginia Education Association and Virginia PTA. Jenna Alexander, President-Elect of Virginia PTA, highlighted the economic benefits of expanding the Virginia Literacy Act.

“What we’ve been seeing over the past couple years is even though we have a really robust system of intervention, that intervention hasn’t really been moving the dial on changing students’ literacy skills,” Alexander said. “This ultimately becomes a really wise investment, it invests in our kids right now, in fourth grade, moving through eighth grade, so that within seven years, you would wind up spending less money on reading instruction and intervention.”

Samira Nematollahi, a student at the University of Virginia’s state and local government policy clinic, worked closely with Coyner and Lucas to form the bills. Nematollahi highlighted the importance of providing support in middle school where literacy is not usually taught.

“This offers a really important intervention for those students as well, so that we don’t have a large cohort of students who graduate from high school and, and have below grade level reading proficiency,” Nematollahi said.