CCSD launches Read Across Charleston challenge; district reports modest midyear gains in kindergarten readiness

Charleston County School District Superintendent Michelle Huggins told trustees Feb. 10 the district is pushing a districtwide reading campaign and tracking early literacy through pre‑K and kindergarten assessments.

Huggins said the district has run multi‑year reading minute challenges—15 million and 20 million minutes in prior years—and this year’s goal is 25,000,000 minutes districtwide. Students can log minutes in Beanstack, she said, and the district is encouraging principals to invite community partners through an “Adopt a School” effort to help address chronic absenteeism, health care access, food insecurity and other nonacademic barriers to learning.

“Literacy starts at birth,” Huggins told the board during her superintendent’s report. She said the district tracks pre‑K outcomes with myIGDs and kindergarten outcomes with FastBridge and that the district’s monitoring report shows “improvements across the system” in early literacy and numeracy for students who attended pre‑K.

Associate staff presented kindergarten FastBridge midyear results. The trustees were shown an increase of 2 to 3 percentage points in the share of kindergartners assessed as “low risk” for reading difficulties on midyear measures compared with fall screens. Presenters emphasized action plans: principals are developing midyear action plans and the district plans to monitor progress again in spring.

Trustees pressed staff for more precise breakdowns of the data. Several trustees asked for disaggregations that separate children who were enrolled and tested in fall from students added to the test window in winter, and to flag the effect of Head Start participants and other subgroup shifts. “If not, you’ve got a misrepresentation of data that really may make you think that students are more ready than they really are,” a trustee said during the discussion.

District staff said they will work to provide disaggregated comparisons where possible and to mark limitations. The presentation also noted subgroup results: multilingual learners rose from roughly 28% to 38% in the “low risk” category, pupils in poverty held flat at ~52%, and students with disabilities dipped from roughly 50% to 41% on the midyear FastBridge measure; staff attributed some of the special education changes to assessment transitions and behavior‑baselining questions.

Why it matters: kindergarten readiness is used as an interim indicator for the district’s strategic goals and the weighted student funding (WSF) investments that target multilingual learners, students in poverty and students with disabilities. Trustees asked staff to return with clearer margins and disaggregations at a later meeting so the board can assess whether investments are producing the intended effects.

Additional items from the report

- OGAP (Open Gaps in Algebraic Progressions) and LETRS: staff said the district uses OGAP/assessment systems and has invested in LETRS professional development to align reading instruction with the science of reading.

- Adopt a School: the district will publish profiles for each school showing two or three needs and pursue business and community partnerships to “adopt” schools or classrooms; principals will invite an adopting partner to experience a principal for a day.

- Next steps: trustees asked staff to bring a revised presentation with disaggregated data, margin indicators and school‑level summaries in a future report; staff agreed to provide more detailed breakdowns where feasible.