FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Fayetteville students and educators have hosted a summer reading camp in response to the LEARNS Act, which puts new stricter reading standards in place that could cause some students to be held back.
The bill aims to have all students reading at grade level by the third grade. If not, students could be held back from continuing with their peers into the fourth grade.
To get ahead of the issue, the district hosted "Camp Excel."
According to its website, Fayetteville Public Schools is hosting Camp Excel "to continue developing reading skills over the summer and prepare students for third grade."
Kari Kinne is the director of Academic Programs in Fayetteville and said many parents were happy the camp was created.
"I've heard kids come in when they're here in the morning telling their teachers how happy they are that they're here to help them because they want to be better readers," Kinne said.
Parker Evatt just completed his first year as a teacher while teaching second grade at Holcomb Elementary in Fayetteville. A former student of Ramay and Fayetteville High, Evatt is now one of the five teachers helping lead instruction at Camp Excel.
"I feel like literacy is such an important subject in school, especially for these students going into third grade, because third grade is such a monumental year in school," Evatt said.
The camp started June 4 and goes until June 28. Students are provided transportation and lunch while they study from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
They're using Really Great Reading working on specific skills like fluency and comprehension. Kinne described the program as "systematic and it's structured and it's explicit and it's rooted in the science of reading, which we know is something that will help our students."
Kinne says 55 students enrolled for the program with five teachers to provide low teacher-to-student ratio instruction. She adds that the camp was made possible thanks to a grant from the Fayetteville Public Education Foundation.
Fayetteville used individual assessments from class, their comment informative assessments, DIBELS, their MAP scores and other data points to identify students for the summer camp. Kinne explained that the state will use ATLAS scores to decide the retention of third grade students from fourth grade.
Kinne said the camp was created in response to the LEARNS Act, an issue many Arkansas school districts face preparing for its effects. According to the bill, "By the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, if a public-school student has not met the third grade reading standard, as defined by the state board, or the student does not have a good-cause exemption, as provided under this subsection, the student shall not be promoted to fourth grade."
"They start reading more advanced stories, and they start to get a lot of the testing things. It starts to get more intensive. And so that's why third grade is such an important year," Evatt explained.
The state is providing resources like literacy coaches for students, but since the passing of the LEARNS Act, educators have faced challenges in implementing its policy.
"We are still looking at the different parts of that, and things are still changing. We had just that part of the LEARNS Act with the retention of second of that those third graders just changed a couple weeks ago," Kinne explained. "When something new comes out, we look at it, we see what's best for our students. We adapt and make changes we implement, and then we look at the data to see if that is working or not. And then we continue to constantly strive to get better."
Kinne said the district will review data resulting from Camp Excel to see if they could expand in the future. She says they would like to include other grade levels.
"The goal would be for them to be more successful, for them to feel more successful that they are ready for third grade," Kinne said. "We want them to go into third grade feeling confident that they are better readers, that they are fluent, that they have those comprehension skills. We just want them to feel like they are ready for third grade."
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