The Mississippi Department of Education is launching a new campaign to keep parents and guardians up to speed on the reading scores of their children in early elementary school.
Know Your Child’s Reading Score, the name of the new initiative, serves to have caretakers of kindergarten through third-grade students well informed of their child’s reading ability and the support made available by school districts and schools.
The Literacy-Based Promotion Act requires school districts to assess the reading skills of students in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. Schools administer screeners to determine a student’s reading ability, and students receive a score on each screener.
If the score indicates a student may be at risk of having a substantial deficiency in reading, school districts are required to provide written notification to parents or guardians until the deficiency is remediated. The written notification is provided in what MDE refers to as “literacy screener letters.”
“All parents should be notified of their K-3 students’ scores, but literacy screener letters are only sent when a student’s score shows a child is not reading on grade level,” MDE State Literacy Director Kristen Wynn said. “With this campaign, we want parents and guardians to know they should receive this information from teachers. Once they have this information, teachers and parents work together to ensure students receive the necessary support to improve their reading skills.”
If a student is not reading on grade level, an individual reading plan is required to be created. Meetings between parents or guardians and teachers are also mandatory to help students succeed in reading.
More information about the Know Your Child’s Reading Score campaign can be found here.
