CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The first full school year with implementation of the Third Grade Success Act has wrapped up in West Virginia.
The legislation aims to improve math and reading skills for students in grades K-3 by providing funding to place teaching aids in classrooms statewide.
Aides have been in kindergarten classrooms since before the bill was signed into law by Gov. Jim Justice in 2023. During the 2023-2024 school year, aides were added to first grade classrooms.
School leaders and state lawmakers recently told MetroNews the legislation has been successful in its first year; however, there was a learning curve.
State Senate Education Committee Chair Amy Nichole Grady, who sponsored the legislation, said the aide serves as a second teacher.
“They are actually apart of the instructional process, so they team-teach. If the aide and the teacher do it well in their classroom, those kids don’t really know who the teacher is or who the aide is. They just know that they have two teachers in their classroom,” Grady said.
Grady, who also teaches 4th grade in Mason County, said the program will continue to build with aides being added to second grade classrooms this fall and third grade classrooms in 2025.
“By the time these first graders are in fourth grade or fifth grade, you’re going to see a big difference,” Grady said.
Teachers are instructed in what is called the “science of reading,” incorporating phonics, phonemic awareness (the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in words), vocabulary, fluency (reading accurately, quickly and with expression), and comprehension.
Kanawha County Schools Superintendent Dr. Tom Williams said the school district is providing training to teachers and aides each summer. He said parents can also do their part at home.
“If the child is not read to and doesn’t receive a lot of attention at home, then they’re going to come to kindergarten and may not even know their ABC’s, their numbers, colors or any of that, so these aides are definitely a big help,” Williams said.
Williams said having an aide in kindergarten and first grade classrooms allows for supervision on students who may be struggling.
“While I’m working with one group, you can be working with another, and then we have a group working independently, and then you can switch off and the independent group goes to the teacher and another group goes to the aide,” he said. “The more eyes you have, the better.”
Deputy State Schools Superintendent Sonya White said in addition to classroom aides, there will also be seven math specialists and seven literacy specialists across the state because of new state funding.
White said they’ve been able to collect preliminary data from the beginning to the middle of the school year regarding students needing intervention in grades K-3. She said the numbers are encouraging.
“We identified the students that were having the most difficulty with reading and math and then we looked at them again in the middle of the year,” White said. “For literacy, we had a 5.4 percent decrease in the number of students needing intervention at the middle of the year.”
With that intervention, Grady said there’s only so much of a pool with instructional aides. Some of those aides are being pulled from special education classrooms. Grady said she introduced a bill that supported pay raises for aides; however, lawmakers never took up the bill.
“It is a problem. The turnover rate with special education aides is really high and we want to stop that. Those kids really need a routine and having the same person there really helps them,” Grady said.
Children whose reading deficiencies are not corrected by third grade will be held back unless an exemption is met. This will begin for the school year starting July 1, 2026.