BIRMINGHAM — Training remains a major challenge for implementing new state literacy guidelines, educators said at a meeting of a state task force on Thursday.

Members of the Alabama Literacy Task Force also discussed implementing a “continuum” of training on the new standards and expressed concerns about not reaching all children.

“As long as we allow what I call the fraying of the edges, there’s those that are going to accept that,” said Jackie Zeigler, the District 1 representative on the Alabama State Board of Education.

The Alabama Literacy Act, passed in 2019, put reading coaches in schools and provided for special training for K-3 students struggling with reading, with an aim of having students read at grade level by fourth grade. Third-grade students who are not reading at grade level run the risk of being held back.

The law also created the Literacy Task Force about reading programs, continuum of teacher training in the science of reading and an annual list of vetted assessments.

The 2023-24 school year is the first year of full implementation after several delays of the retention portion of the Literacy Act.

The Alabama Legislature made changes to the law last spring, including changes to the amount of time that previously purchased assessments could be used by districts. Assessments vetted by the Task Force will be valid for three years beginning with the 2023-24 school year. In that time, assessments can be added but not removed.

Task Force Chair Kristy Watkins, director of curriculum instruction at Jasper City Schools and a new member of the group, said that one of the problems she has been seeing on the district side is getting teachers to teach to the course of study standards, not the textbooks.

“That is where I am struggling,” she said.

Watkins said she has had questions from a teacher about first-graders not being taught adverbs, which are not in the standards. Watkins said the teacher told her she does not have the time.

Short said that she remembered she could not get everything done in a textbook each year, so she had to shift her idea to teaching the five big ideas of the textbook.

The discussion came in a small group discussion that went through previous memorandums issued related to the Alabama Literacy Act.

Cailin Kerch, clinical coordinator of early childhood elementary at the University of Alabama, said that a new test for the early childhood reading instruction will be more “rigorous” in the science of reading than the previous version.

Science of reading

The is a body of research that looks into how kids learn to read. The skills associated with learning to read were not being taught in many schools for many years, as reported by

balanced literacy rose in prominence in the 1990s as a bridge between phonics and whole language instruction. Whole language was the philosophy that kids learned to read through exposure. Balanced literacy includes methods such as “three-cueing,” which encourages kids to look for clues, such as at pictures, to guess an unknown word.

Watkins said that she sometimes gets teachers who are not trained in science of reading before they come to her.

“I have to retrain you to come in and do science of reading,” she said. “So, it’s aggravating.”

In the whole group discussion, the Task Force also discussed losing some districts. Zeigler said that she worries about “most” in terms of helping most but not all kids.

Bonnie Short, director of the Alabama Reading Initiative, said that districts who are further along in their progress might not be able to access all of the help that they might need.

Limited support (LS) schools are defined in the Alabama Code as being schools not in the bottom 5% of reading proficiency. An Alabama Reading Initiative regional literacy specialist will visit Limited Support One schools once a month. An Alabama Reading Initiative regional literacy specialist will visit Limited Support Two schools quarterly. The local superintendent will “determine the level of limited support that each regional literacy specialist shall provide.”

Short said more intervention might be required.

“Even our LS one schools that get monthly support, they really need more than that,” she said. “And our LS two schools, while they may be trucking right along, they may need additional pieces and parts. But I’m limited.”

Short also suggested a cohort for some of the highest performing districts so they can share their skills. She said they still have room to grow but less than other districts.

Reading camps

Another aspect of the law that they needed to look further into were the summer reading camps.

Under the law, the camps are under the Task Force. The Alabama State Department of Education has been mostly working with that portion so far, said Mark Dixon, president of A+ Education Partnership, an advocacy group that aims to improve public education in Alabama.

“It was something that we received funding for, to be able to support,” Short said after the meeting about the summer learning programs.

The summer learning programs are avenues to improve literacy instruction for students outside of the normal school year.

Some of the changes, such as extending the amount of time that some current assessments are allowed to be used, has given the Task Force some time to work more on other things such as a continuum of training. Dixon said that some of those changes could be to their benefit.

“You’ve given yourself a little breathing room,” he said.

In discussion, the members said that they could use that time to focus on the “continuum” for teachers and other school employees outlined in the law. A smaller subcommittee had looked into that portion of the law in the past. Since then, other legislation, like the Numeracy Act, has passed, so they want to make sure they do not overwhelm teachers. They also said they want to bring in other groups and look at what other states are doing.

Short said that she does some work with higher education groups.

“Do you start with those groups separate?” she asked the members. “Do you start with those groups together? I think it’s probably important to have our vision board.”

The next meeting will be in January.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

Logan Greene, a teacher in Hoover City Schools had his students read, a memoir of a Holocaust survivor. He heard there was an opportunity for the author to come speak to students. But it would require them to raise $1,000 in around two weeks.

“I told the kids there’s no way we can do it,” he said.

But his students reacted enthusiastically. Five of them stood outside of basketball games for two weeks and raised over $2,000.

Greene said that effort by his students showed him the interest in the subject, and the power it has. He started looking for ways to “grow my own practice.”

“That showed me kind of the power of Holocaust education in schools and that led me to start researching how could I grow my own practice,” he said. “How could I get better? And I discovered the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center and started doing workshops and attending the teacher cadres and then it all snowballed from there.”

Alabama, like most states, does not mandate the teaching of the Holocaust. The state’s social studies standards, due to be revised in the next few years, could potentially include a Holocaust component in the future. 

But even without a mandate, there is enormous interest from schools in the subject. The Holocaust Education Center, which recently established a home in Birmingham’s Temple Emanu-El, instructs teachers on how to teach the Holocaust to students in pedagogically sound ways. Gov. Kay Ivey went to the dedication ceremony on May 22.

“I think students want to learn about every hard history, because they like controversies and because I think that they want to make the world a better place,” said Zoe Weil, director of educator engagement at the Holocaust Education Center.

‘Sometimes there’s just not an answer’

Dan Puckett, chair of the Alabama Holocaust Commission, said that learning about the Holocaust is essential for students.

“I think it gives us a much better understanding of who we are,” he said. “Human rights, you know, understanding the value of human rights, the value of civic engagement, I mean, all of that’s necessary for a civil society. Everything that happened in the Holocaust, that we’re looking at, was actually a result of state-sponsored actions and none of it was illegal. It was sponsored by the German government, the Nazi government.”

Ann Mollengarden, an applied researcher at the center, said they do not prescribe a specific curriculum for teachers on the Holocaust, but they do make pedagogical recommendations. Some teachers may only have two or three days to address the subject.

One of the things the center emphasizes is that there are no simple answers when it comes to the Holocaust. 

Mollengarden said teachers need to explain the history and discuss motivations. Every group, she said, had their own reasons for making the decisions they did. 

Teachers should be prepared to be unable to answer the students’ questions, she said.

“A teacher always wants to be able to give an answer to a student and sometimes there’s just not an answer,” she said.

The center also recommends teaching history from different perspectives: perpetrators, victims and bystanders.

“This is not just A-to-B-to-C-to-D history,” she said.

Gretchen Skidmore, director of education initiatives at the United States Holocaust Museum, said that the Holocaust became more of a part of public school education in the 1970s, when more survivors began speaking about their experience. She also cited the influence of “Holocaust,” a 1978 NBC miniseries credited . 

Since then, she said that Holocaust education has evolved from the facts of the Holocaust to looking at the reasons behind it.

“We want people to not only know what happened, but how and why it happened and that is a major change,” she said.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has resources for educators, including a

Greene said that the center is constantly changing their practice, and he’s constantly updating his pedagogy alongside them.

“People sit here and they think history is just history and it’s there,” he said. “But it’s really quite the opposite. We’re always adjusting our practice and we’re always finding new ways to really increase our ability to educate not only students but the public about the Holocaust.”

When asked about lesson plans for what a student might learn, Greene pointed to the organization , where he is interning this summer, as one he would use.

Their sample lesson plan for studying the Holocaust involves connecting themes to the present day and learning about Jewish life before the war. It includes videos of a survivor and a liberator, and a map of where Jewish people lived prior to deportation.

Centering survivors

Greene said that ten years ago, he would have been far more likely to compare the Holocaust to other events in history. Now, he said, he might look at similar themes across history but probably wouldn’t make the comparisons, which he says is not good practice.

“The Holocaust itself is a very unique event in human history,” he said. “So when you try to make direct comparisons, it can be fruitless to try to compare this genocide to other ones. Secondly, when that happens, it is very common for comparisons of pain to happen. And that’s just something we don’t want to do in education. We don’t want to sit here and look at it as was this genocide worse than others.”

Holocaust educators have always stressed the need to have survivors at the center of the lessons. While reading survivors’ accounts is strongly encouraged, Greene said, the use of video or audio accounts are recommended. 

“We always want to let them tell as much of the story as possible,” he said.

Greene’s students have grown up in an online and multimedia age, so video of Holocaust survivors humanizes them to students. Hearing and watching survivors tell their stories, he said, conveys emotions that students may not get from just reading passages or diaries.

“It helps to turn the Holocaust into a grouping of individual stories about the larger event,” he said.

Mollengarden said that simulations – where students are asked to play people who may have experienced the terror of Nazi persecution – are not recommended pedagogy. 

For example, students told to stand together in a small square, as a way of experiencing what it would have been like to be in a box car, lack the feeling of the life before that exact moment. 

“Do those students understand the terror before they were even put into the boxcars?” she said. “Do those students understand the conditions people were living in before they went into those boxcars? Do the students understand how families were torn apart, and some were in one place in one somewhere and another or that they did not know where they were going? I mean, you cannot, you cannot fathom this.”

Legislators over the last two years have introduced legislation to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” in Alabama public schools. Among other provisions, the bill would ban teachers from instructing students about members of one group being inherently responsible for the suffering of another. The bills have not become law. 

Greene said that the teaching of “divisive concepts” does come up when he’s teaching the Holocaust. Teaching against hate and intolerance should not be divisive, Greene said, but he knows that other teachers have anxiety over the concept. Greene said that he has spoken with other teachers during workshops and had conversations with parents.

Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, a member of the Holocaust Commission, which provides some funding to the center, cosponsored the divisive concepts bill but said that he did not believe that the legislation would have impacted Holocaust education.

“The Holocaust, in my mind, is not a divisive concept,” he said.

Greene said that it’s important for teachers to be constantly updating and learning more about their practice and new ways to teach in the best way possible. For example, he implements Google maps in his teaching. He can “walk” his students down the street to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

“Just like doctors, just like lawyers, just like accountants, just like newspaper reporters, we want to make sure that we are doing the absolute best job and most effective research-based methods for educating our students because that’s how we do the best job to prepare our kids for this ever-changing world,” he said.

Mollengarden also said the Center is a resource for teachers, and they can reach out for help or resources that the Center may not have but could provide access to.

“We want to be there for teachers, and I think that’s our primary goal,” she said.

What is lost

The Center houses an archive of letters, pictures and artifacts from the Holocaust. On a recent visit, archivist and librarian Rachel Jones Lopez pulled out two pairs of scissors from one of the boxes. 

One of the pairs of scissors is in good condition. She said the man who donated it said it was his grandmother’s, who came to the United States shortly before the Holocaust began. She was a seamstress, and the scissors were her livelihood.

The other pair of scissors were burned, and had another piece of metal, perhaps an eyeglass frame, melted into them. The donor found the burned scissors at Auschwitz in the 1970s or 80s in a place called “Canada,” where all of the items stolen from the Jewish people taken to Auschwitz were thrown. (The Nazis thought of Canada as a place of wealth, Jones Lopez said.)

The donor took the burned scissors because they were so similar to his grandmother’s.

“This is someone who left before things got bad, and this is someone who didn’t,” she said.

Jones Lopez says she thinks the tactile experience gives people a stronger connection to Alabama history.

She also pulled out postcards collected by a survivor when he was a young boy traveling through Europe. He was disguised as a Catholic orphan after being rescued by a French organization.

Most of the postcards had a place and a date. She also showed a book where he just collected the autographs of people as he traveled through Europe.

“So you can kind of trace where he was, that he just collected these postcards as he went,” she said.

Greene said sharing these stories mean a lot to him. 

“Students want to learn this material,” Greene said. “I really believe that when you sit down with kids, and you can have these hard conversations with them, but they ask incredible questions. And they are incredibly invested in learning this and students are more empathetic than we give them credit for sometimes, and they want to learn how to make the world a better place and they want to learn how to stand up against things like this.”

Greene said that one of the most impactful things he had learned from the Center was the small number of survivors left. Weil said there are 173 documented Holocaust survivors in Alabama who are still alive. Only a few survivors can still speak about their experiences. 

That, Greene said, has brought an urgency to his work. 

“Teachers are going to be really the keepers of this story from now on,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

Editor’s note: to protect students’ and families’ privacy, we have chosen to refer to students and their families by first name only.

Last Friday evening, in Birmingham, Alabama, parents, guardians and friends sat under sparkling rows of string lights, waiting in joyous anticipation for the ’s inaugural graduation ceremony.  

Charity Jackson, Magic City’s chief academic officer, stood center stage in front of a ring of white, gray and purple balloons. Mike Wilson, the school’s founding principal, led the faculty and staff into the main space of the , the all-ages LGBTQ+ organization that birthed the South’s first charter school dedicated to affirming LGBTQ+ students.

Finally, a single-file line of 12 seniors, clad in purple caps and gowns, entered the space. As Jackson began introducing the graduating class, the crowd erupted in cheers full of pride, appreciation and love.

Since the Acceptance Center had been the inspiration and inception place for the Academy, this moment brought everything full circle. It was also a moment that felt long overdue.   

In its early stages, Magic City Acceptance Academy suffered three rejections from the Alabama Public Charter School Commission. However, the school was finally approved and opened its doors in the fall of 2021 in the Birmingham suburb of Homewood, Alabama, with 250 students in grades 6-12.   

When the students first came into the space, said Wilson, they were “wrapped up in their trauma.” They had come from environments where they’d been bullied and marginalized. At the Academy, the staff and faculty worked to educate and empower their students.    

Clover, a graduating senior, said it wasn’t until they came to the Academy that they saw their grades flourish. Along with the good grades, they’ve also created bonds with students that they never thought they’d have. Clover said,

Clover’s mother, Rachel, said from the beginning of the year till now, she’s seen a change in them. Previously, Clover was “miserable” in school, and there didn’t seem to be many options. But when Rachel discovered Magic City Acceptance Academy, she thought it could be a solution. Rachel said,

“Seeing your child come into their own and be their own individual is quite an experience that I didn’t expect. I mean, I knew that they would make improvements and make friends, but seeing them come out of their shell and become who they are has been one of the greatest parenting experiences I’ve had.”

To Support Traumatized Youth, Adults Must Shift Their Thinking

To create an environment that focuses on both the mental and social development of students, the Magic City Acceptance Academy is a trauma-informed space.  helps professionals change their focus away from asking “what’s wrong with you?” to asking “what happened to you?”

Making that shift was challenging, said Academy history teacher Lexia Banks. 

“It was kind of like having to learn how to teach all over again because we are emphasizing different parts of the students here and giving more priority to their mental and social development and our overall mental health,” she said.

The payoff was evident at the eighth graders’ promotion ceremony, held earlier in the day. The students seemed full of joy as they played with friends and went to teachers to offer them heartfelt goodbyes and even handwritten letters.  

Banks said she’s seen how students have transformed from being shy and scared to being able to demand things that, in the past, they’d only ever have the courage to ask close friends.  

“It’s been an honor to be able to provide that kind of support,” she said.  

Offering trauma-informed support is a key piece of Magic City Acceptance Academy’s model, but it is also just one piece of a larger puzzle. Principal Wilson said the Academy talks about social justice initiatives, practices restorative justice and weaves in social and emotional learning, while also providing strong academics.

After Political Pushback, Community Steps Up

Magic City Acceptance Academy has pushed forward despite some political pushback.

In April, an Alabama gubernatorial candidate released a  criticizing the Academy for “exploitation” of children and “not education.” Due to this, the Academy had to add security to keep students safe from strangers who showed up at the school’s property to film students or shout Bible verses at them.  

However, after this, the Academy began to garner more support from the community. They received encouraging messages on a blog a parent had posted, emails and even postcards and signs from churches in the surrounding area.  

Last Friday large colorful signs from different churches, including , hung along the walls in the cafeteria and the first floor with messages like “You are beautiful” and signatures from its members. Handmade posters sported inclusive and encouraging phrases like “You are perfect just the way you are.” 

Some of the posters even came from beyond Alabama. One read:

“Remember to just take a breath. Smell the roses and blow out the candles. You are loved and important. You’re doing your best. Black Forest, CO.” 

Closer to home, the local community has bonded with the new school in many ways, whether through the local staff members who had been with Wilson for years, or via the school’s partnership with . 

This bond also appeared during graduation, when Denise Bishop, a supporter of the school, and  a Mardi Gras Krewe for the LGBTQ+ community, presented two scholarships to senior Gwen. The news prompted a spectator to call out: “I’m proud to be your aunt!”  

‘This Was a Lifesaver’  

These bonds among students, faculty, staff, community and families create a palpable environment of love and acceptance. Danny Carr, Jefferson County’s district attorney, took note in his commencement address.   

“When I walked into this room, and as I sat here, you know what I felt? I felt love. I felt respect. I felt opportunity. I felt honor. I felt all those things we so need in our community,” Carr said.

After Carr’s speech, students received their diplomas, and Wilson offered his closing remarks. “Two and half years ago I sat right behind those books writing this proposal so we can have this school, now look at you,” he said.  

“We are the best school in the country,” Wilson proclaimed, jumping up and down with emotion. “This day and every day I’m proud to stand up and say I am who I am in this building, in this school, in this city, in this state. I am a cis-gendered gay male who has the best darn school in the state because we have the best darn staff in the state,” he said. “God bless you all, and know … there’s this group of people who are always going to be there for you. I love you. Thank you for sharing your senior year with me.”

After the ceremony, a grandparent approached Wilson and said, “I’m not overstating; this was a lifesaver.”

Wilson hears accolades like this with profound ambivalence. While he’s grateful the school is living up to its mission, he wants to live in a world where no young person should be in life-threatening danger because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

But in the world where Wilson lives—Birmingham, Alabama of 2022—it hurts to tell any young person there’s no room for them at Magic City Acceptance Academy. Already, they have enough applications to meet their target enrollment of 350 students. Wilson is hoping to add another counselor and social worker to the staff to meet the needs of more students.

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