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The results have been significant.
Krista Wagner, Mad River assistant superintendent, said in the middle of 2022-2023 school year, only 50% of kindergartners were at or above benchmark on their reading composite scores, versus 74% in 2024-2025.
Wagner said even before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools, the district had begun to see more students scoring “not on track” for reading as they entered kindergarten.
This benchmark is a big deal because reading skills build, so a student who is already behind entering kindergarten needs more intervention to get their skills to grade level. If they continue to advance without catching up, the student becomes more at risk for dropping out.
“This is a significant amount of growth for increasing foundational skills in K and first grade to close any gaps, so students can become skilled readers,” Wagner said.
Some of the skills needed in the new state curriculum include phonics, or how to pronounce the sounds that letters make in words, decoding, a skill that helps kids figure out based on context clues what the word says, and automatic recall, where a student can quickly remember what the sound and letter is without having to think about it.
How kids learn to read is much more complicated than those skills alone, but they play a role in getting and keeping kids on track for reading.
Mad River started by using Wit and Wisdom, a popular curriculum, in 2025, Wagner said, eventually adding Fundations, which teaches several basics of reading, and has now added Heggerty, which teaches phonemic awareness, and Geodes, which allows students to practice the phonics and decoding skills they are learning in Fundations through integrated texts.
The district also added preschool classrooms, which also contributed to higher reading schools, Wagner said.
In one kindergarten classroom at Virginia Stevenson Elementary, teacher Mandy Guilmain began to implement different curriculum available and found ways to bridge gaps and better teach her students about two years ago.
On a recent visit to Guilmain’s classroom, the students did roughly an hour of phonemic awareness, vocabulary and reading.
To start, they split into two groups to compete in who could put magnetic letters in a circular alphabet in order the fastest. The group that won did so by seconds.
Guilmain said she’s found it isn’t enough to do a single reading lesson in a day. Kids need a lot of repetition in reading and math skills, so the building incorporates the skills from the classroom to the playground.
“There is no way that we can teach in isolation anymore,” she said.
She said Mad River as a district has always been good at teaching accuracy in reading. But the piece that was missing was fluency and automatically recalling sounds and words.
That part is harder, because there aren’t many curriculums offering fluency in reading, she said.
Then, she found Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, a concept that twists together language comprehension and word recognition to build skilled readers. For Guilmain, it was a game-changer.
By integrating vocabulary and sight-word recognition routines throughout the day, students strengthen orthographic mapping, or the brain’s ability to retrieve words for accurate, automatic reading.
She said building skilled readers requires intentional integration of language structures, background and literacy knowledge, verbal reasoning, phonological awareness, and decoding across all subject areas throughout the entire day, every day.
Guilmain frequently uses progress monitoring and assessments, which help both her and her students understand their current skills and guide next steps in learning.
Guilmain has gotten incredible results from this approach. In the 2023-2024 school year, her students jumped from 34% at or above grade level to 79%, and in the 2024-2025 school year, her students jumped from 20% at or above grade level to 89% by the end of the year.
“We didn’t know we could achieve that,” Guilmain said.
Administrators took notice, and Guilmain presented her results to the district.
“We want 100% of our kids to be able to read,” she said. “It’s just – if we don’t do that, then we’re failing.”
Eileen McClory is the Dayton Daily News education reporter.
