Leap Year Publishing

Augusta Literacy Gains in the 2025-2026 school year gave families, educators, and community partners a useful set of local reading measures to study. During that school year, the Community Foundation for the CSRA invested more than $250,000 in its Literacy Initiative, which supported programs reaching more than 1,200 children in the Augusta and broader CSRA region. Those figures do not prove that one program alone caused every reading improvement, but … Read the rest

Cleveland literacy outcomes deserve careful attention because early reading data can show where children need support long before later school measures appear. On September 21, 2026, Axios Cleveland reported that only 36% of Cleveland’s third graders were proficient or better in English Language Arts on the 2025–26 Ohio state report card. The same report said CMSD held at 2.5 stars out of 5, below Ohio’s standard for expectations, while … Read the rest

Building Strong Readers became a clear federal signal on September 9, 2026: reading instruction, early intervention, and local literacy systems were treated as urgent education priorities, not side projects. The U.S. Department of Education announcement stated that nearly 70% of U.S. fourth- and eighth-graders could not read proficiently and that twelfth graders had the lowest reading scores ever recorded as of that date, according to the federal literacy announcement.… Read the rest

Reading Recovery remains one of the better-known early literacy interventions used with first-grade students who need intensive reading and writing support. For families and school communities, the most useful question is not whether one program can solve every reading concern. The better question is what the evidence shows, where the evidence is limited, and how schools can use short-term intervention data alongside broader K-4 literacy measures.

As a literacy coach, … Read the rest