HB513 (2012) Early Literacy Intervention

In 2012, the Utah State Legislature passed HB513 creating a program to help at-risk students with literacy intervention, growth, and achievement in student grades K-3. The program was designed to be technology based and centered on the adaptive learning process. As a result, millions of dollars were allocated to schools to purchase adaptive literacy software for their intervention programs.

With the goal of the HB513 to raise student literacy performance, several vendors were allowed to provide this software to adapt technology to bridge the gap in student literacy performance. Not to be confused with the pre-K money listed as “Waterford,” this allocation is directed to the K-2 population and allowed us to choose more than one vendor if needed to meet the objectives of all three grades.

Garfield County School District has utilized several of the software venders in hopes of finding game changing data. We are currently using the software package provided by the Waterford Institute and iReady but hope to change a few selections for next year. For the 2017-2018 school year, we will be using Waterford and also a software called myON. myON generates individualized, interest-based recommendations within all learners’ target Lexile® ranges to engage them with just-right texts. Learners select books from the entire library, choose from a recommended list of titles curated just for them, or read from book sets created by their teachers to support instructional goals. More than 13,000 enhanced digital texts from Capstone and over 60 partner publishers, as well as daily news articles, are available.

In addition to these two software based learning systems, watch for additional reading and literacy practices to include a take home library for students and parents to read together nightly with books specifically aligned with your children’s reading level rather than their age or grade based grouping.

Tracy Davis, Superintendent – Garfield County School District