BROOKINGS — When Summer Schultz was hired as Brookings School District superintendent in June 2023, she brought with her a teaching philosophy called the science of reading. Two years later, she said that approach is achieving results.

“This isn’t really new. There’s just some of those components that weren’t happening here,” Schultz said. “It’s just aligning all the things we know to be true about how students read. Because when it’s not working, we meet and have intervention teams that say, ‘what’s not working here?’ Then we change. Before, we would maybe wait for the end-of-the-year, standardized test scores.”

The science of reading relies on phonics — sounding out individual words — in contrast to having kids memorize commonly-used words or teaching them to decipher unfamiliar terms based on context or visual clues. The method emerged from a pair of government studies in 1998 and 2000 suggesting a five pillar, phonics-based approach is most effective at teaching kids to read.

“We’ve now been able to look at the brain and see how parts of the brain light up when we’re doing different things with reading and with writing,” Sarah Wiebersick, Dakota Prairie Elementary principal, said. “That research has shown us that we needed to do phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. Those are the five pieces we focus on.”

The approach also emphasizes regular progress checks to ensure students are learning.

“Only in Brookings these last two years have we been intentionally progress-monitoring to see where growth is happening,” Schultz said. “Everyone always sees those end-of-the-year standardized test scores. We’re now constantly looking at the growth that’s happening for students, so each teacher knows what’s working for their students — or not. And that’s a big change.”

Wednesdays are early dismissal days in Brookings, and teachers now use that time for weekly reading assessments.

“When the kids go out, we have time,” Wiebersick said. “We have to dig through — it takes a lot of time to dig through data and analyze it — to tell us what to do next. Then we need to prepare for what to do, if it is changing course a bit. It takes time, but it makes a difference. We’re seeing positive results. I’ve had many teachers say, ‘why weren’t we told how to teach reading before?’ … We were doing the best that we could with the knowledge that we had; but now that we know better, we can do better.”

When assessments indicate a student is struggling, teachers identify and address the problem quickly.

“It’s about looking at skills,” Wiebersick said. “The skills might be phonics, so we take the kids who are missing that phonics piece and we drill down to specific things like — is it vowels or is it something else that we’re missing? Then we work in small groups to fill those gaps.”

Schultz said small group instruction is more effective than lumping students together based on broad skill categories.

“Back when I was teaching reading, we would group kids based on proficiency — how good of a reader you were,” Schultz said. “All of the students in a certain area were grouped together, rather than finding out which one of those five areas they needed more help with. … So what we do better now is figuring out which one of those areas does that student need more work in.”

She said the method works best when language learning difficulties are detected early.

“We have screeners who help us uncover those sooner so that we can start rewiring how that process looks,” Schultz said. “That’s a piece of our preschool program. When we say it’s a literacy foundation, it’s so we can really start digging into finding what those students need in order to be on grade-level for literacy when they come in (to elementary school).”

Interest in the science of reading has increased nationally as schools scramble to address falling test scores. Last year, the Nation’s Report Card found fourth-graders 5% lower in reading proficiency compared to 2019. The report found 60% of fourth-graders in South Dakota achieved a basic reading proficiency rating — a 9% drop from 2019.

Last year, the state legislature appropriated $6 million for a program to train teachers in the science of reading. Schultz said Brookings took advantage of that.

“Our teachers have almost — especially in the younger grades — almost all have taken the training,” she said. “They’re antsy for more information. They’re always asking our literacy team questions. There is this culture of wanting to know, and I’m just excited to see where it’ll go.”

Wiebersick said it helps having teachers all on the same page.

“Teachers were doing great things in their classrooms, but everyone was doing their own version,” she said. “We were all taught differently in college on how to instruct on reading. So all of those things had to be aligned and brought together. Good things were still happening, but it wasn’t all aligned and targeted to fill the deficits for students who were missing things.”

Schultz said — because there was no uniform approach in the past — some students have slipped through the cracks.

“We know that a lot of times students who are poorer readers have found survival skills,” she said. “We understand that they have found a way to still do OK in their studies. But to me, literacy is a foundation for success in life. If I can do anything for a student, it will be making sure that we’ve given them every effort to become a lifelong reader.”

To that end, Brookings High School will have a new reading intervention program this fall.

“We’re working right now on a ‘Foundations of Literacy’ program at the high school, because we still have time with those students,” Schultz said. “We’re still trying to determine — is that a class or is that an intervention? Each student might need something different, so how will that look? … But we know that each year, we will have less need for the high school intervention with large numbers of students — if we’re doing this right.”

Wiebersick said she’s already witnessed results at the elementary level.

“We’ve had some students who have struggled with reading and maybe had some outside tutoring,” she said. “They’ve been able to stop the outside tutoring support because the way we’re teaching is reaching them in the way they need it. They’re growing. Their skills are growing. We know that because the data is showing us that.”

Schultz said this is a method she wishes she’d been familiar with back when she was a reading teacher.

“I truly believe every student deserves a teacher who understands and knows the science of reading,” she said “But then, every teacher also deserves to be trained. It’s not a quick process. But this district, our staff and people like Sarah who have been leading this charge — they’ve all been amazing in pushing that work, getting others to understand, and it’s been great to see.”

Contact Jay Roe at jroe@brookingsregister.com.