2022-06-09-LHRC-min - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. A member emphasized the importance of this holiday, its relevance to the Lexington Human Rights Committee because it is about ensuring peoples' rights to equality and that this responsibility belongs to every individual. TG additional a reminder that it is also Caribbean Heritage Month, Pride Month and African American Music History Month and ABCL will host its annual Walk for Freedom. • Literacy Equity Presentation by Nicole Locher. Ms. Locher is the co-founder of Lexington's Dyslexia Parents Group which is a subgroup of LexSEPTA/SEPAC (Lexington's Special Education PTA and Special Education Parent Advisory Council). Some local parents recently launched LexReads to supports reading equity for all kids by advocating for evidenced based early literacy instruction in the general education classroom, as well as in the interventions LPS uses for struggling readers. The aim of today's presentation is to provide an update on work being done around literacy and what it means from an equity lens. • In 2018 Massachusetts passed a law requiring screening for risk of dyslexia, followed by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's (DESE) MA Dyslexia Guidelines on early screening, reading interventions through a multi- tiered system of support and referral to special education. DESE also launched Mass Literacy, an effort to empower educators and students in Massachusetts through evidence-based early literacy. This is an encouraging direction moving towards a preventative model starting in kindergarten, using a comprehensive approach of the Essential Components of reading, which includes: phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Explicit and systematic instruction of phonics teaches early readers the essential skills they need to sound out and decode words, leading to greater vocabulary acquisition and comprehension, whereas memorizing whole words can limit the reader to learning only those specific words. Humans are not born with the ability to read; it is a learned skill that must be taught explicitly! While LPS is evaluating their literacy programs and has recently added phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in their early literacy classrooms, parents continue to be concerned about some lingering methodologies that have been debunked and may continue to contribute to inequities in reading in LPS students. Of key concern is the "3-queing" approach which encourages early readers to use syntax, meaning and visual cues to decipher unfamiliar words, rather than the evidence-based skill of sounding out and decoding the words. Guessing at unfamiliar words can lead to the masking of reading skill deficits and of learning disabilities such as dyslexia, as well as forming bad reading habits, which puts kids at risk of reading failure when they encounter more complex text in later grades. Looking at recent 2019 & 2021 MCAS data for English Language Arts (ELA) for Grades 3-8, 50% of students who are economically disadvantaged do not- /partially meets expectations; while 75% of African American students do not-