Many tears were shed inside a nondescript meeting room inside the Wyoming Capitol, where legislators gathered last week to discuss education policy.
Adolescent students cried while telling lawmakers about their own debilitating reading struggles and the subsequent anxiety and self-doubt they felt. Parents broke down describing the frustrations of watching their children advance in grades even as their reading difficulties undeniably impacted their performance. A grandfather’s voice cracked as he recounted the transformation his granddaughter made once she was finally identified as dyslexic and received appropriate help.
“Please do not fail these children,” the grandfather, John Ridley, implored lawmakers on the Legislature’s Joint Education Committee.
Ridley joined family members, students and educators calling for the committee to advance draft legislation that would create a more robust K-12 language and literacy program in Wyoming.
Over several hours Wednesday, the literacy advocates described in detail their own personal challenges with reading instruction in Wyoming schools. Parents talked about recognizing deep learning challenges in their children that educators assured them were no big deal. Educators spoke about how a popular method for teaching reading has been debunked in recent years and should be outlawed for the way it leaves certain students behind. And students spoke of a growing dread and anxiety around their inability to keep up in school.
Many of them talked about Paul Pine, the Cheyenne fifth grader whose story has become emblematic of how deeply literacy struggles can impact lives. Despite repeating kindergarten and receiving small-group interventions, Pine was only reading at a first-grade level by fifth grade. It wasn’t until that year that assessments determined he was likely dyslexic. By then he was distraught, and he died by suicide one day in 2023.
“Many of you know the heartbreaking story that brought me here,” his mother, Chandel Pine, told lawmakers. She first testified to the committee in favor of literacy improvements in 2023, she noted.
“That day, I learned something I wish I had known sooner,” she said. “We’re not alone. Only half of Wyoming’s children can read proficiently by third grade.”
Ultimately, lawmakers agreed to sponsor the bill as a committee in the 2026 Legislature. Their vote comes just weeks after Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder announced a new statewide language and literacy initiative involving stakeholders such as parents and the University of Wyoming. Together, they represent a commitment to align Wyoming’s educational system with top evidence-based methods for building student literacy.
“This is very exciting and a huge priority, perhaps the biggest priority for me this legislative session,” Degenfelder told the lawmakers.
A group effort
The bill aims to ensure that every K-12 Wyoming student develops strong language and literacy skills and that struggling readers do not fall through the cracks.
It comes as reading scores in Wyoming and nationally have ticked down in recent years. In 2024, 36% of the state’s fourth graders and 29% of eighth graders performed at or above the proficient level in reading on national standardized NAEP tests, lower than the previous five years.
Some 32% of Wyoming fourth graders performed below basic, which was a slight increase from 29% in 2022. For eighth graders, 30% scored below basic in 2024, up one percentage point from 2022.
Wyoming’s scores hovered above the rest of the country; the state has long ranked comparatively high in national testing. But literacy challenges still appear across the educational spectrum.
National experts have pointed to reading instruction as one of the contributing factors. Journalist Emily Hanford’s well-known 2022 podcast “Sold a Story” exposed how educators across the country believed they were teaching a best-practice approach to reading that was later disproven. The podcast shifted how the literacy field views reading instruction. At least 26 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since it began to air.
Wyoming could be next. The legislation resulted largely from the work of a literacy subcommittee with input and feedback from stakeholders working on the statewide initiative.
The statewide partnership includes a range of entities — from the UW College of Education to WYO Right to Read and the Wyoming Professional Teaching Standards Board.
“This was a group of highly educated, highly focused individuals who all came together to reflect their interests, and those interests are reflected in the document,” said Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, who worked on the subcommittee. “I honestly think this bill is exceptional at this point.”
At nearly 20 pages, the bill includes many provisions. But in broad strokes, it would establish a system of instruction, intervention and professional development that is evidence-based to provide teachers, families and students with comprehensive and effective tools for teaching reading and addressing deficiencies.
That includes shoring up statewide assessments to better identify dyslexia and other learning disabilities; ensuring that every district has a written literacy strategy; triggering individualized education services for struggling readers; and mandating that no district relies solely on a debunked approach, known as a “three-cueing system,” to teach reading.
“This bill reflects what we’ve seen in other states that have successfully implemented literacy policy,” said Nish Goicolea, chief policy officer at Wyoming Department of Education.
Pinedale teacher Lindsay Adam told lawmakers that Wyoming schools need the resources to retrain teachers in the advanced skills it takes to identify student needs and to teach in a way that appropriately addresses them.
“We can dig ourselves out of this hole,” Adam said. “But we spent the last 30 years digging our way into it. So it’s going to take some time, and it’s going to take some money.”
‘A promise to Paul’
The Education Committee heard several hours of testimony Wednesday related to the bill, including support from parents and concerns about how the measure could have disparate impacts on Wyoming’s wide range of districts.
When the committee closed testimony and began to work the bill, Sen. Charles Scott, R-Casper, said he didn’t think it was quite “ready for prime time.”
“I think it is headed in the right direction,” Scott said, but added, “I think it has some major deficiencies and some things that need to be fixed.”
Martha Lawley, R-Worland, who also sat on the subcommittee, cautioned against “letting the perfect get in the way of the good.” Committee chair and retired teacher Wendy Schuler, a Republican state senator from Uinta County, echoed that, and the measure carried enough votes to advance.
During public testimony, many people talked about how Paul Pine’s mother, Chandel, had connected them with one another and to resources crucial for helping them or their students deal with reading difficulties. They have found community in the common goal, they recalled.
Indeed, after she first testified in 2023, Chandel Pine and her husband founded a nonprofit called Paul’s Mountain to help students with similar struggles of their son. Many testified to the life-changing possibilities the nonprofit has connected their families to in the two years since.
It’s part of a vow Chandel Pine made in the wake of her son’s death.
“After that first testimony, I made a promise to Paul, to every child like him, that his story would not end in silence,” she told the committee.
Kim Coulter has spent a lot of time and money supplementing her daughter’s education due to a reading disability, she told lawmakers. Coulter likened reading gaps to a cracked foundation — a base of all other learning that is fundamentally compromised.
“Having additional support in place when we recognize a cracked foundation can help support future growth in each child’s education, allowing our children to be successful learners,” Coulter said. “This bill is that support.”
Parallel paths
Meantime, the statewide initiative has laid out plans that also aim to bolster literacy support. Those include offering professional development to educators statewide in the “science of reading” — a body of evidence that supports things like phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and comprehension. Wyoming’s educator preparation pathways will be expanded through a new dyslexia specialist program at UW. And a new grant will allow for Wyoming educators to earn national reading instruction certification.
The education department also secured a $24.4 million federal grant this fall to improve literacy instruction. The department will launch a competitive grant process for school districts in January to disperse these funds.
The statewide initiative isn’t just a one-time collaboration, Degenfelder said in a statement. “This is an unprecedented coalition of state education leaders and parents united around ensuring that every kid in Wyoming can read at grade level.”
Sad that our state secretary of education has no background in education.
Unlike Jesus, we cannot turn water into wine. Most of us, probably agree with Jesus’s teaching that putting new wine into old wineskins is not wise.
However….
Since the 1950s, as a nation, we have been trying to change water into wine by pouring new, ‘certain to succeed’ strategies and methods into a public school system, the design for which follows Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management Theory. That theory became widely accepted in business and industry around the time when Wyoming became a state. Policy makers and leading educators at the time adopted that philosophy. The architecture and management structure and philosophy of the public school system still follows those principles and that philosophy today (largely in the form of the ‘hidden curriculum’).
In my over 50 years as an educator, i have served students from junior-senior high school through doctoral-level programs. One thing I have noted is that you are doomed to fail as long as you continue to put new models of instruction into the old wineskins of Taylorism. I have witnessed innovative program after innovative program promoted because their progenitors market them as qualitatively more successful than that which was then the status quo. Marginal and temporary success occurs here and there, but soon the new wine has leaked out to be lost in the dust of history.
We need to realize that the public school system is producing exactly what it is designed to produce. That will not, and cannot change as long as we keep the old wineskins. I am convinced that the teachers we want to keep are working at, and sometimes beyond, capacity. They cannot work any harder. We are discouraging the best among us. The ones who are leaving are less concerned about pay. The best leave because they do not feel they are treated (and trusted) as professionals.
The proof of failure is palpable. From mid-20th century, we have spent trillions of the Nation’s wealth on “improving” school programs (with emphasis on math, science, and reading). A few examples help illustrate our efforts.
Among a plethora of smaller initiatives, we have tried the new curricula introduced in the 1960s (responding to the 1957 launch of Sputnik). We tried to respond to the “Nation at Risk” report in the eartly 1980s. We have spent uncountable hours and money implementing the “No Child Left Behind” legislation. In the name of accountability, we have increased our emphasis on state and national standards and standardized testing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
So, after all that, who among us is proud of the results?
What else do we really think we can before we stop putting new wine into old wine skins? I assert that no matter how hard we strive, our best efforts to turn water into wine will leave us with just water and all the new wine we give to educators will fall to the ground.
I say invest in migrating to a total and bold redesign of the school system, and stop blaming teachers for the failure to keep new wine you give them when all they have available to them are old wineskins.
It is a beautiful thing that the academics and legislators in our state want to improve reading achievement. The same thing happened in Alabama about 6 years ago and they went in a different direction. But between 2019 and 2024, and despite the sharply negative impact of Covid, and while our state’s scores tanked, only 1 state improved its performance on 4th and 8th grade reading tests – Alabama. Seems to me that we might get better results by learning from an experiment that is still ongoing and still resulting in even more improved scores if we check out the changes they made.
As someone who was part of the subcommittee, we definitely looked at Alabama and Mississippi, the other state to also raise their scores through the pandemic. We took what we knew was working and what we knew would not we left out. We also made sure we included other things that they may have missed in their laws. This bill has been months of research and collaboration to make sure we get it right for our kids.
Alabama was 49th in 2019 and 34th in 2024, Wyoming was 6th in the nation in 2024 for 4th graders and 21st for 8th graders. Maybe we should look at Massachusetts, which has been the overall top-performing state (not just in reading) on the NAEP since 2005. This means they has been #1 for 20 years.
You can NOT look at rankings. To get a true picture you have to look at the percent of students proficient or above. Not a single state has more than half their students proficient or above. We are all failing our children. The other metric to watch is avg score growth. Our score went down even though we are ranked high, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas have all changed laws and raised their scores. Growth is what we want, not meaningless rankings. Just because you are at the top of a pile of crap doesn’t change the fact that you are standing in it.
Ms Hesser, “Just because you are at the top of a pile of crap doesn’t change the fact that you are standing in it.” Well said!
This topic is paramount in success for the child. Children passed socially to the next grade does nothing for the child. Big impacts on mental health, suicide and productivity, Imagine graduating high school and being illiterate. 70 percent of those on welfare are illiterate
K’s too late. How about stronger support for programs like Raising Readers (books passed out at regular Pediatric Exams), and increased support for Rayuniversal pre-school?
While Raising Readers is a great program and preschool would certainly help, giving kids books does not teach them to read. That is a very explicit and systematic process that requires well trained teachers and evidence based supports. That’s what this bill will achieve.