Pickerington Schools Launches Literacy Tours

By Leslie Kelly, Executive Director of Teaching and Learning

In January 2020, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) published Ohio’s Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement to detail the state’s vision and direction for literacy. This plan identifies the “Science of Reading” (SOR) as the foundation with a commitment to structured literacy instruction, specifically naming the “Simple View of Reading” as the framework to represent the science.

The 133rd Ohio General Assembly passed legislation concerning the screening of and intervention for children with dyslexia in April 2021 and in July 2022, Ohio’s Dyslexia Guidebook was published to provide guidance as districts implement the requirements of the newly passed law.

During his State of the Union Address in Jan. 2023, Governor DeWine also emphasized the importance of SOR by stating, “In our budget, we are making sure that all Ohio children have access to a curriculum that is aligned with the evidence-based approaches of the Science of Reading.”

The key component of ODE’s plan, the guidebook and the State of the Union Address is the Science of Reading and the Structured Literacy approach that utilizes the Simple View of Reading Framework.

According to Ohio’s 2022 Dyslexia Guidebook, “Structured literacy approaches facilitate children’s ability to learn how to map speech to print, which is the core difficulty for students with dyslexia and students with dyslexic characteristics and tendencies. When students are systematically taught the connections between speech and print, they are better positioned to learn how to read, spell, pronounce and store the meaning of words in memory.”

Pickerington Local Schools (PLSD) has been in the forefront of this work. In the 2014-15 school year, PLSD began utilizing Orton Gillingham with striving readers in need of intensive reading support. Orton Gillingham is a direct, explicit, multisensory, structured, sequential, diagnostic, and prescriptive way to teach literacy when reading, writing, and spelling does not come easily to individuals, such as those with dyslexia. Explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction has also long been a practice in our elementary classrooms, along with comprehensive reading and writing instruction to build background knowledge to support access to complex texts.

Tussing and Sycamore Elementary recently hosted Michelle Elia, Ohio Literacy Lead with the Ohio Department of Education. During our visit to Erin Courlas’s first grade class at Tussing Elementary, we watched as students engaged in explicit phonemic awareness lessons, and systematic, mul- tisensory phonics instruction. We were also able to witness the strong literacy routines that have been established and support small group instruction. During our visit to Kelly Dishong’s second grade classroom at Sycamore Creek, we watched as her students also engaged in systematic and multisensory phonics instruction, as well as students accessing complex text and discourse with the background knowledge that had been developed in previous connected lessons. Ms. Elia said she was impressed with the instruction she observed in these classrooms as examples of structured literacy coming to life.

After the classroom visits, Ms. Elia and I met with a few members of the literacy team that have been leading this work (Lori Seymour, Joni Scipione and Sharon Caccimelio). Based on this experience, our team developed the PLSD Literacy Tour to host districts who would like to see Structured Literacy in practice and have the opportunity to discuss lessons learned with our experts. This year alone, Pickerington Schools has hosted five school districts, with additional requests continuing to come in stemming from Ms. Elia and her visit to our classrooms.

Pickerington Local School District is poised to be a destination literacy district with our diverse demographics, length of implementation, overall student success and willingness to share successes and challenges. As the Ohio Department of Education and the State continue the work to bring the Science of Reading into all classrooms in Ohio, Pickerington stands ready to be a partner in this work as we also continue our ongoing literacy journey.

By Rachel Karas