There’s an urgent need to ensure that every child in West Texas receives high-quality, evidence-based reading instruction from kindergarten through second grade. That’s the vision behind a new $5.5 million initiative led by Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk researchers Letti Romero Grimaldo, Sharon Vaughn and Shannon Giroir.
Funded through the Permian Strategic Partnership in West Texas, the project seeks to transform early literacy through a job-embedded professional learning model. Rather than relying on individual workshops, coaches will work with teachers on their own campuses in two major school districts. The work focuses on five key components: high-quality core instruction grounded in the science of reading, strong supplemental instruction, linguistically aligned assessment for emergent bilingual students, systematic use of data to guide teaching and leadership capacity.
