South Dakota schools are working to drive literacy rates back up

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) - South Dakota ranks 11th in the nation in literacy rates; that high ranking may not last. Post-pandemic, rates continue to drop.

According to the National Literacy Institute, illiteracy has become so prevalent that 130 million Americans cannot read a simple story to their children. Reading is the backbone of anything that you want to do in life. Kids who struggle to read not only fall behind in school but can also fall behind emotionally and socially as well.

“So, if you’re not reading well, you start to look around and think ‘Why is this so hard for me when that person over there, my friend, is done way ahead of me.’ So, then it starts to really work on a child’s sense of who they are,” says Coralee Alley, a school psychologist.

Kids who continue to struggle will eventually find other ways to survive, which can cause disturbances and anxious behavior.

“A lot of times when reading is a struggle day after day, about middle school, you can start to see, or earlier, some really more interfering behaviors,” Alley continues.

South Dakota maintains a high national reading average but after the pandemic, schools have noticed a steady drop in reading rates. Now, kids reading at basic levels are seen reading at below-basic levels.

To combat this, kids are now getting ahead by starting to read earlier.

“We start with early literacy, and we offer story times that engage the kids with songs, puppets, and a variety of stories with various themes. We also offer reading initiatives where it motivates kids to read at home and we make these custom tracking charts like a thousand books before kindergarten. Summer and winter reading, and they get proud tracking their accomplishments and turning them in for prizes, Laurinda Tapper from the Rapid City Public Library explains.

There are 5 major steps kids should take when it comes to mastering reading: language development, comprehension, phonemic awareness, phonics, and application

A major way to help your child get better at reading is simply by reading to them. Having physical books in the area can impact a child’s reading ability.

“Kids model behavior, right? They model their peers’ behavior; they model the adults’. Kids who live in homes where books are laid out say they see people reading, are like 60% more likely to be a good reader as they get older,” Alley concludes.

It is important to know what is behind the child’s difficulty, to take the right steps to get them into reading.

“The most important thing besides finding what interests them is to read at the right level. So, if they are reading something too easy, they are not going to grow in their literacy, but if they read something too difficult it’s going to discourage reading,” says Tapper.

House Bill 1022 would provide the South Dakota Department of Education with $6 million for a four-year statewide teacher training effort in the science of reading (SOR), an intensive approach to reading instruction at the elementary level that relies in part on phonics, or using sounds within words rather than letters to help children read.

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