By CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN

Most Kansas students graduate high school nowadays. Yet many still struggle with the skills of reading and writing.

Now a task force of educators, parents and lawmakers hopes to help close that gap.

Over the past half year, the Dyslexia Task Force put together recommendations and this month handed them off to the Kansas State Board of Education.

The group’s work is well worth paying attention to. It could change reading instruction for every public school student in the state.

The goal? Catching a wide range of struggling readers and spellers earlier on.

Signs of dyslexia according to research at Yale University
It extends far beyond dyslexia — though even that, some researchers say, is far more common than parents and teachers realized in the past.

Ugh, English is hard.

Though, bough, cough, tough.

You’ve probably reflected on the woes of English spelling before. Usually we just throw up our hands. Or shrug. Or jokingly congratulate ourselves on having the strangest writing system in the world, then move on.

That’s not acceptable to teachers who specialize in instruction for children with dyslexia.

Unbeknownst to many of us, much of the “weirdness” does follow patterns. (English professor Anne Curzan has this enjoyable column to that point.)

Angie Schreiber began learning these nitty-gritty guidelines after finding out her son had dyslexia. Now she runs an Emporia private school that teaches students like him.

“English is 80 to 85 percent regular,” she argues. “If we teach to the regularity and not use the irregularities as an excuse, we can teach our kids to read, write and spell.”

A couple examples:

Check out the “ie” words in the photo below. Shield, tie, brief, die, and so on.

This is a photo of a teacher’s laptop while her eighth-grade student with dyslexia practiced reading them aloud. It helped him to recall that “ie” often sounds like an “i” at the end of a word, but like an “e” if it’s in the middle.

And what about spelling “back”? What’s that “c” doing before the “k”? Schreiber explains that English usually uses “ck” at the end of a one-syllable word after a short vowel. Hence “back” and “truck” get a “ck” that “bank” and “think” don’t.

Solution to the big ole reading gap?

Teaching such guidelines are one part of “structured literacy,” an approach to reading instruction that may soon be required of every elementary school in Kansas.

Some people swear by it. Others roll their eyes.

The disagreement is part of “the reading wars” — a decades-long and nationwide rift in the sphere of literacy education.

How can there be so much to debate about teaching kids to read? Well, because so many people worry we still haven’t figured it out.

Even the optimism around No Child Left Behind waxed and waned. Nearly two decades later, Americans continue to enter adulthood without mastering this vital skill.

Though almost 90 percent of Kansas students graduate high school, a third of the state’s high-schoolers score below grade level on English tests. More than two-thirds test below the higher proficiency bar that Kansas uses for federal accountability.

Structured literacy teachers argue they know how to resolve a big chunk of that reading gap.

They’re not saying all those children have dyslexia — they’re saying research shows structured literacy improves reading and spelling across the board.

Did you miss the Kansas News Service’s feature on dyslexia?
Plenty of literacy specialists disagree (hence the “reading wars”). Sometimes, experts on either side even cite the same research as showing totally different things.

Rethinking classrooms and college

So, back to the dyslexia task force’s decision this month.

Pending approval from the Kansas State Board of Education, the group wants to make structured literacy part of the college coursework required to teach in this state. To get their licenses, many teachers would need to pass a test that shows they understand and can teach in depth things like “phonemic awareness” — which involves recognizing and breaking down individual sounds in words.

Schools would need to offer training for teachers already in the field and incorporate structured literacy into general reading instruction for all students.

Read a draft of the task force’s recommendations.
Reports from state-appointed panels don’t always lead anywhere. Some end up looking more like political theater than anything else. Don’t expect that fate for this one.

“This, obviously, is not going to be one of those reports that sits on a shelf someplace,” said retired superintendent Jim Porter. “It’s going to get the attention it deserves.”

Porter chaired the task force and, until recently, the state board.

Adopting structured literacy would add Kansas to a national wave of states passing laws and policies meant to better serve children with dyslexia.

Even among those states, though, a radio documentary by APM Reports suggests implementation has proven tricky.

The state board of education may vote on the task force’s recommendations in the coming weeks or months. Rolling out new standards in thousands of schools and training a critical mass of teachers will take longer.

“I’m worried that it’s going to be a 10-year process,” says Christina Middleton, a Lenexa mother whose son wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia till the summer before fifth grade.

That’s when she took him to Children’s Mercy Hospital for tests, got a diagnosis and signed him up for private instruction in structured literacy.

Half a dozen reading programs had failed him before that point, she says. Now in high school, he reads at grade level.

Teaching schools wanted a seat at the table

Colleges of education may well ask the state board to rein in some of the recommendations. They worry Kansas is on the brink of sweeping changes that bypassed them.

The sole professor on the dyslexia task force was psychologist David Hurford, who founded a center focused on researching dyslexia and teaching children who struggle with reading.

The dyslexia task force membership
“There is a voice missing,” Ken Weaver, dean of the Emporia State Teachers College, wrote in an email this week. “That is the literacy faculty from all the Regents universities.”

Those professors likely would have expressed concern that task force members were misunderstanding the thrust of decades of research on reading education. Or underestimating the extent of phonics and related instruction already taking place in Kansas schools.

But from the point of view of parents who say schools failed their children year after year, the status quo just hasn’t been working.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @Celia_LJ.

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. (AP) — A woman who was raped in front of her 2-year-old daughter several months before prosecutors say her two assailants abducted and sexually assaulted a Kansas sheriff’s deputy says police seemed to doubt her when she sought their help.

During a hearing Thursday in which one of the men, 41-year-old William Luth, pleaded guilty to raping her, the Independence, Missouri, woman told the court that the officers who investigated the February 2016 attack in her home “made it abundantly clear that they were pretty sure I was just being dramatic.”

No suspects were identified in that attack until Luth and Brady Newman-Caddell were arrested for the October 2016 sexual assault of the Johnson County, Kansas, sheriff’s deputy and authorities say DNA evidence linked them to the earlier attack.

The Missouri woman said from the outset, the Independence police seemed to doubt her story that she was raped in the same bed as her toddler. She said they asked her about her past sexual partners and pored over her social media history and phone contacts.

“They made me feel insane,” she told the court.

She also said it made her sick when she found out that Luth had raped another woman. “I owed this woman so much gratitude for being strong enough to endure what they had done, and to have the courage to seek justice,” she said. “Without her, I wouldn’t be here facing William Luth today.”

She said her case was solved because she underwent a rape examination and “forensic scientists did their job,” and that she hasn’t received an apology or acknowledgement from the police department even though her account was proven true. She said at least with Luth, she gets an admission of guilt, which she described as proof that “I was telling the truth.”

Officer John Syme, an Independence police spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to an Associated Press phone message Friday seeking comment.

Both Luth and Newman-Caddell pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping the deputy, with Luth getting sentenced to 41 years in prison in that case and 30 years for the Missouri attack, to be served at the same time.

Newman-Caddell was scheduled to be sentenced Wednesdayin attack on the deputy, but the hearing was called off when he told the judge he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea. The charges against him in the Missouri attack are still pending.

The Star and the AP don’t generally identify victims of sex crimes.

SALINE COUNTY — A pair of small earthquakes shook portions of central-Kansas Saturday.

The first quake just after midnight measured a magnitude 2.8 and was centered approximately four miles east of Salina, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A 2.7 quake was also reported in the same area just before 10:30p.m.

These quakes follows a 3.8 magnitude quake Friday afternoon in Sumner County. And a series of five quakes ranging from a magnitude 2.5 – 4.5 in Sumner County since January 16 according to the USGS.

There are no reports of damage or injury from Saturday’s quakes. Saline County dispatch said they received no calls on the quake.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The first new KC-46 air refueling tankers have arrived at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita.

Two of the tankers landed at the base Friday afternoon.

The tanker uses the Boeing 767 passenger airplane as its airframe, and McConnell is the first base to receive the next-generation tanker. Boeing has said McConnell is slated to receive two more of the aircraft next week.

The long-awaited tankers replace KC-135 air refueling tankers used by McConnell’s two air refueling wings, the 22nd and 931st Air Refueling Wings. Eventually, McConnell will have 36 KC-46s to replace its aging fleet.