This commentary is by Charlene Webster, of Arlington, and Dorinne Dorfman, of Plainfield. Charlene has taught grades 3-6, special education and structured literacy in southwestern Vermont over her 40-year career. Dorinne teaches reading to grades 5-8 at Barre Town Middle and Elementary School, and has served as principal of Leland and Gray Union High School in Townshend and Champlain Elementary School in Burlington.
It’s never too early to start reading instruction and intervention in our schools. The best time for students to obtain strong foundational reading skills is between prekindergarten and the second grade. During a child’s pre-K through kindergarten years, deficits in language, alphabetics and phonemic awareness that may develop are small.
Effective intervention, especially at this early stage, can close these gaps. Unlike other developmental milestones (such as walking and talking), reading rarely develops without direct instruction. Consensus research has shown that literacy gaps in the earliest grades predict reading problems later. The longer schools wait to remediate, the greater the reading failure gap, the harder to correct and the less likely students will ever become proficient readers.
In the past, American schools have chosen to “wait and see” by giving students more time to develop reading skills. This approach has been renamed “wait to fail” because rarely did gaps close without evidence-aligned intervention.
Vermont passed legislation in 2024, Act 139, which abandoned this approach. Parents/guardians can pay careful attention to see how their schools are providing effective intervention beginning at the youngest grades.
Parents/guardians will know effective remediation is being delivered when they see their children’s growth by receiving detailed progress-monitoring assessments and hearing their children sound out new words and read aloud with fluency and accuracy.
In fact, when students as early as pre-K and kindergarten demonstrate poor skills on these predictive assessments, schools should provide intervention right away to close existing gaps before these students fail to make reading progress.
These assessments include:
- The names and sounds of all letters in the alphabet
- Rapid Automatized Naming, which are skills in retrieving the names of letters, numbers and objects accurately and automatically.
- Oral language skills: speech articulation, vocabulary, grammar, understanding longer sentences, attention and following directions.
Act 139 requires all students in grades K-3 be assessed and receive classroom instruction in the five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Assessments must be valid and reliable, and administered following the test’s technical specifications at least once a year.
Schools must notify the parents/guardians of students found significantly below proficient. Some schools have chosen to report all their students’ progress on the five reading components. Parents may always request results from these screenings.
Although Act 139 has put an end to misguided instructional approaches that have harmed student reading, thousands of Vermont students today continue to struggle to learn to read and write.
For this reason, Act 72 — which was formerly called H.480 and was passed in June 2025 — requires public and approved independent schools to provide effective intervention to students significantly below proficiency in reading or whose poor reading skills impede school progress.
Act 72 applies to all grades K-12 and requires an appropriately trained education professional to provide remediation. Schools must notify, support and share information with parents/guardians of students found significantly below proficient.
Carrying out Vermont’s reading laws provides every student the opportunity to learn to read well and succeed in school and adulthood.
