Oregon’s pandemic kindergarteners prepare for middle school with critical reading gaps

Last Wednesday, 11-year-old Geniya sat in a corner of the library at Ockley Green Middle School in North Portland, where she’ll be a sixth grader this fall, intently concentrating on spelling the word “prince.”

It’s a deceptively tricky word. The “ce” combination at the end could just as easily be an “s,” the “i” in the middle could perhaps masquerade as an e and it’s not unreasonable to assume that there is a “t” hidden in the middle, a la the word “prints.”

Geniya tried out all three of those mistakes, using magnetic tiles on a white board to spell “prents” before squinting at it critically, and swapping out the e and the t, but leaving the s in place. Next to her,

Cathy Parker

— a reading interventionist at Woodlawn Elementary turned adolescent literacy tutor for a session of summer school — reminded her about the phonics of a so-called “soft c”: When paired with an i, like city, or e, like prince, it sounds like an s, Parker prompted.

It’s the kind of scene that is

increasingly common

in elementary schools across Oregon: regular one-on-one or small group sessions with a young reader, unlocking the sounds that letters and letter combinations make, and then putting them back together to make words.

But for middle schoolers like Geniya, such intensive reading interventions are fewer and farther between.

It’s not because of a lack of need. The students who are entering sixth grade this fall were in kindergarten when their

school year was cut short

because of COVID. Geniya and her classmates spent virtually all of their first grade year online, curtailing their learning. Second grade was back in person but spent wearing masks,

impairing their language acquisition

. The Oregonian/OregonLive is withholding the last names of the students in the tutoring program to protect their identities.

By the time the trappings of the pandemic were almost completely gone from these students’ classrooms, they were in third grade, the year when students are expected to be ready to transition from learning to read into reading to learn.

Far too many did not make that leap.

The most recent

state testing data

, from the 2023-2024 school year, shows that 58% of fourth graders statewide could not read proficiently, putting them at a statistically significant risk of not graduating from high school, let alone going to college or entering the skilled workforce. That translates into a

huge threat

to Oregon’s future economy, local and national economists alike have warned.

Oregon lawmakers and education officials know well that the state has a literacy problem and have poured tens of

millions

into trying to fix it over the last three years.

But school districts may only spend money from the state’s Early Literacy Success Initiative grants on kindergarten through third graders, their curriculum materials and their teachers. For example, in Portland Public Schools, about 12% of the district’s K-3 students worked with a dedicated reading tutor during the 2024-2025 school year, yielding an

average of double-digit growth

in reading skills for participating students.

Similarly intensive help for pre-teens and adolescents who are below grade level in reading is much spottier. Many middle schools in Portland and elsewhere have dedicated reading specialists but there are more kids who need focused help than there are adults to provide it.

“Where is the money for adolescent literacy?” asked Melinda Lepore, a reading specialist at Cesar Chavez K-8 School in North Portland. “We cannot write these kids off. We see the train, and it is coming. It’s on us. Unless they get intervention, they will go out into the world without the basic skills they need to support themselves.”

Lepore and Parker are both spending July as part of a cadre of tutors working with about 35 soon-to-be-sixth graders at Ockley Green. They are enrolled in Leap into 6th Grade, a program run by the Portland-based Blosser Center, which partnered with Portland Public Schools to offer the one-month curriculum. The nonprofit offers tutoring, writing classes and summer programs for students with dyslexia and other learning challenges.

The centerpiece of Leap into 6th Grade is a daily 50-minute, one-on-one reading tutoring session. The program also offers breakfast, lunch and snacks, plus time for writing and math help in small class settings and social-emotional learning lessons.

Tishon Bermudez’s 12-year-old daughter, Shashamane, who is named for the city in Ethiopia known for its Rastafarian community, is enrolled in the program. In just a few weeks, Bermudez said, she’s seen Shashamane gain exponentially more confidence in her reading, going through books fast enough to earn prizes from Multnomah County Library’s summer reading program.

So far, Shashamane said, she’s gotten Oregon Zoo tickets and a doughnut, and is looking forward to earning her commemorative summer reading T-shirt.

“Now, finally, things are making sense for her,” said Bermudez, who works as a nutrition assistant at Cesar Chavez School. “The pandemic just killed her. Online, no one even dressed to go to school. They were all spending time on YouTube. It was just all over the place and it took a toll.”

Even when Shashamane was finally back in school, Bermudez said her daughter seemed to spend a lot of time in front of a computer, just “pressing buttons.”

“Kids just got passed by and were getting overlooked,” Bermudez said. “But she is getting help now. I believe she will be a scholar. I tell her, ‘This is for now. You won’t be like this forever.’”

Back in the Ockley Green library, Parker was wrapping up a one-on-one session with another soon-to-be sixth grader named AJ. They’d read a story together, AJ said, and when they were done, they worked on practicing spelling key words from the book. He demonstrated with magnetic tiles, spelling the word “changed,” and misplacing the “g” before catching his own mistake and earning praise from Parker.

Middle school will be a struggle for too many such students, particularly those for whom there was no room in summer learning programs, Parker predicted.

In addition to losing ground in their early learning years due the pandemic, the current crop of middle schoolers were in kindergarten, first and second grade as many districts around Oregon were

shifting

to a science of reading-based curriculum, Parker noted. The science of reading emphasizes phonics and phonemic awareness as essential stepping stones to reading accurately, fluently and with understanding.

Many of their teachers, meanwhile, had come from university programs around the state that historically emphasized other methods of teaching reading that are now viewed as incomplete at best, though

a shift

is also underway in higher education.

But a change of this magnitude takes time, and practically speaking, meant that many educators were learning how to change their approach to teaching reading and how to use new curriculum just as this current cohort of middle schoolers arrived in their classrooms, Parker said.

Alongside the pandemic, that’s two strikes against the current crop of middle schoolers, she concluded. But the expectations facing them — that they have mastered foundational reading skills by the time they hit sixth grade — haven’t changed.

“We’ve got to meet students where they are,” Parker said. “But the problem is that the focus is all on vocabulary and comprehension, going into middle school.”

The students that Parker and Lepore work with will still need one-on-one or small group reading support in middle school, they say, but dedicated resources to make that happen are all too slim, Portland Public Schools Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong said Friday at an Ockley Green event at which Green Bay Packers football player Alex Green, a graduate of Benson High School, addressed students about his own struggles to learn to read.

“We are addressing literacy through our curriculum, and there are intervention periods that can be folded in at the middle and high school levels, but we know it is not enough,” Armstrong said.

And making room in the middle school schedule for literacy tutoring sessions, especially with contracted employees from outside programs like the Blosser Center, can be a tough sell given the time-consuming curriculum requirements. To meet the need, some school districts, including Beaverton, have experimented with

carving time out of the middle school day

to reinforce core elementary school level skills for those who need it, while providing accelerated learning for others.

Another hurdle: Going back over skills they are supposed to have mastered is a tough sell to pre-teens and teens who are acutely aware of how their peers may be perceiving them and will go to great lengths to hide the shame of being behind the academic 8-ball, said Suzanne LeGrande, executive director of the Blosser Center.

When kids get all the way to sixth grade without being able to read with confidence, “they just quit liking school,” LeGrande said, and find reasons to avoid showing up. The Leap into 6th Grade program is struggling with student attendance issues, she acknowledged, potentially limiting the progress some students will make.

And even if school districts are willing to make room for middle and high school tutoring during the day — as opposed to afterschool when kids have other commitments or are ready for a brain break after a long school day — such efforts carry a price tag, though it can save even more spending on special education down the road, LeGrande said.

Students in Leap into 6th Grade got tested at the beginning of the program and will do so again at the end of the month, to trace their progress. LeGrande is hoping the data will be persuasive enough for the district, the state and philanthropists to fund future expansions.

“We know this is a huge need,” LeGrande said. “We just need the time in the school day and the financial backing to pay our tutors.”

Back with Parker, Geniya was doubling down, finishing up the session with a challenging word: completeness. She made it through the c-o-m-p-l and then paused to consider her options, choosing an “i” before switching it out for an “e”, and then taking her time before deciding that the word needed not just one but two s’s on its end.

“That last word was kind of hard, not going to lie,” she told Parker. “I wasn’t expecting to get it right.”

“You got it right though,” Parker said. “You did it. Give yourself a pat on the back.”

— Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com.

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