Gov. Tina Kotek kicked off her first term this year with an especially big goal – to revamp the way Oregon teaches children to read and write.

Less than half of Oregon students can read and write at their grade level. This has a substantial impact on the students individually and on society.

Kotek is urging lawmakers to approve plans to change Oregon’s approach to literacy education.

would award grants to improve early literacy in schools and communities across the state, and would establish the Early Literacy Success Initiative. The initiative would primarily provide coaching, materials and training to educators to improve literacy education before third grade and create literacy-focused tutoring and summer school programs.

Kotek and Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend, who spoke to the state House education committee Monday for an informational hearing, want the proposals merged into .

The package would launch a multi-year effort aimed at helping parents, teachers and community groups better serve students. They want to increase early literacy for students in prekindergarten through third grade so students can read at grade level by the end of third grade, or for students who are English language learners, by the end of the fourth grade.

They also want to reduce literacy and graduation disparities and increase the state’s overall graduation rate through these efforts. Oregon’s four-year high school graduation rate was 81.3%.

“It’s clear we have a problem in Oregon,” Kotek told the committee. “This problem didn’t arrive overnight, and we are not going to solve it overnight.”

Students failing

The ability to read and write proficiently is vital, but Oregon is failing significantly.

Less than 40% of Oregon third-graders met the state standards when tested in English Language Arts. That number is even lower for historically marginalized students, dropping, for example, to 23% for students in foster care, 21% for Black or Latino students, 20% for students with disabilities and 8% for English language learners.

As children learn to read, they build on skills and strategies. They learn “phonemic awareness,” which the as the ability to manipulate individual sounds in spoken words, as well as “phonics,” which is when we correspond sounds and spellings with syllable patterns to read written words.

They learn fluency and decoding, vocabulary and reading comprehension, and more.

“Teaching reading is very complex,” said Sarah Pope, executive director of the nonprofit , in her testimony to the committee. “Some have even likened it to neurosurgery.”

Though reading and writing skills are measured throughout K-12 education, results in third grade – the first time students are tested by the state – are an important indicator of future success.

Not only is it the time when students stop “learning to read” and start “reading to learn,” as by Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Abel Ortiz, but also researchers have also found that students who can’t read at  grade level by third grade are to leave high school without a diploma.

This makes them less likely to be gainfully employed, and more likely to rely on public welfare or become incarcerated.

According to the , full-time workers with a high school degree earn about 24% more than those without one, and research shows students who do not complete high school are more likely to experience poor health and premature death.

Pope said the proposal could “quite honestly change people’s lives.”

Early literacy package

Kotek and Kropf, along with agency officials and advocates who also supported the early learning plan in testimony, want to focus on helping teachers, families and community organizations in addition to the students themselves.

“We are often quick to identify and label individual kids as ‘struggling.’ But the incredibly high number of kids not reading at grade level tells us we need to take a more critical look at how we are teaching literacy,” Kropf said in his testimony.

“Our educators do amazing work, oftentimes under very difficult circumstances,” he added. “This legislation is about giving our educators the training, support and resources they need and want to best help our kids learn to read.”

Part of Kotek’s plan is to support parents as their children’s first teachers. Knowing children develop communication skills from birth, Gabriela Hernandez-Peden, program director of the Spanish-language preschool program Juntos Aprendemos in Central Oregon, told lawmakers, “Education starts five years before they actually end up in the school system.”

Kotek also wants to train educators across the state to use “evidence-based” instruction once the students enter school. This typically refers to a large body of research known as “the science of reading,” which is about how the brain learns to read and write, and what instruction is most effective. Literacy advocates have argued before that school curricula don’t always come from a scientific foundation or that educators are not always properly trained to teach them.

Kotek said it’s important the state provides teachers with ongoing, high-quality, culturally relevant coaching to help them improve, and so they can create school-wide systems to sustain those changes.

“We owe it to educators to prepare and support them for all of what we ask of them,” she said.

The other aspect of the proposal would lead the state to create summer programs that focus on early reading and writing skills in ways that relate to students’ interests and minimize the perception of summer school as punishment. Kotek said “high-dosage tutoring” should also be available for students who need extra support.

Though the education committee members generally indicated their support for improving the state’s literacy education, Rep. Emily McIntire, R-Eagle Point, expressed concerns over regulating the initiative and the cost. Rep. Tracy Cramer, R-Woodburn, questioned whether the proposal could change teaching in schools that are performing well. And the committee’s vice chair Rep. Boomer Wright, R-Coos Bay, said he wanted to ensure there was enough money to pay for it. The state, he said, has a history of requiring more from schools but underfunding them.

Kotek’s staff told the Capital Chronicle her goal is to have a public hearing in the next few weeks when the package is finalized. Bills need to have a work session for a vote scheduled by March 17 to move ahead in the legislative process, but budget bills and rules’ proposals are exempt from that deadline.

“As we learn from other states about what works,” Kotek told the committee, “we must recognize that building and implementing an intentional, thoughtfully designed and comprehensive strategy will take more than one bill, budget line or legislative session.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Teens, mental health care professionals and crisis-line volunteers told state and federal leaders that youth need access to more culturally relevant mental health care and better communication about what services exist.

Addressing these two issues would go a long way toward combating a youth mental health crisis that has grown in the wake of the pandemic, they told Gov. Tina Kotek and Xavier Becerra, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The group convened at Faubion School in northeast Portland on Monday afternoon to discuss mental health issues facing students and resources available through state and federal dollars. Also present at the K-8 school were representatives of Portland Public Schools and the University of Oregon’s new Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. The institute was set up to address the lack of mental health care professionals by placing its first class of 200 undergraduates into Portland Public Schools as interns in the fall of 2023.

A survey of about one-third of Oregon students conducted in 2020 by the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Department of Education found nearly half felt sad or hopeless for more than a two-week period. And a report released in August by the found that the number of Oregon children struggling with mental health issues grew from 11% in 2016 to 16% in 2020.

Jaiyana Jones, an eighth grader at Faubion, said during a roundtable discussion that COVID and social media have increased mental health suffering among students over the last few years. She said some who don’t feel comfortable talking with counselors and school staff turn instead to abusing substances. Tanvi Vemulapalli, a volunteer for the nonprofit crisis hotline Lines for Life, said a lack of supportive adults is the number one reason young people say they call the hotline.

“It’s one of the biggest things, the lack of comfort reaching out to someone,” Vemulapalli said.

As a Black student, Jones said it would be helpful to have more Black counselors and mental health staff. “People who share some of what you experience,” she said.

Jeida Dezurny, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and a youth representative of the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, said there is a generational and cultural disconnect among many Native American youth to mental health care services. In the absence of more Native mental health care providers, Dezurnby said she and her colleagues have focused on training Native adults from all walks of life to talk with young people about suicide, opioids, mental health, sex and other topics that can feel uncomfortable to discuss.

“We start teaching the caring adults, the educators, the guardians, the community members,” she said, asking them: “How do you address mental health? We know that you probably have never addressed it in your life, and that’s OK, we’re gonna get past it, we’re going to educate you.”

To combat nationwide shortages of school counselors, psychologists and social workers, Becerra said the federal human services department is planning to launch a scholarship program that would help pay for graduate studies for people hoping to become mental health care professionals. In exchange, they would need to commit to three to four years of work in the field.

Becerra also touted the federal government’s investment in the launched in July, which connects callers and texters to counselors trained in helping people in a crisis. Becerra said the Biden administration is investing $500 million over two years to get the line established nationwide, but states will need to provide their own funding to sustain the service.

“I think it’d be a great challenge for the youth who are in this space to convince the leaders in your state – because there are only a few states today that actually provide a steady stream of money – to keep the 988 lifeline going,” he said.

In Oregon, Lines for Life oversees the service except in Marion and Polk counties, where Northwest Human Services is in charge. Kotek’s includes adding a fee of 40 cents per cell line to sustain the 988 Lifeline into the future.

The Legislature is considering several bills to target the mental health care workforce shortage and improve access to mental health care in schools.

Two bills, and , would require Portland State University and Southern Oregon University to educate and graduate more public mental health and addiction treatment providers over the next five years. would require every school district to ensure every school has a mental health professional and nurse.

In 2019, the state allocated more than $1 billion to the Student Success Act, which helped pay for mental health care in schools. Additionally, Oregon received millions from the American Rescue Plan during the pandemic, with directives to use some of it for mental health staff and programs.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .