Wisconsin is the 42nd State To Address Dyslexia

Last July 2023, Governor Evers signed the 2023 Wisconsin Act 20. This legislation requires that all public, charter, and private schools that receive school vouchers must participate in training their teachers in the science-based literacy curricula for foundational skill development.

They are also required after the 2023-2024 school year to stop teaching the 3-Cueing system for foundational skill development, which consists of the three different types of instructional cues:

•  Semantic (gaining meaning from context and sentence-level cues),
•  Syntactic or grammatical features,
•  Grapho-phonic (spelling patterns.)

A science-based literacy approach means it uses instruction that is systematic (follows a precise order of education) and explicit. The process consists of the following:

•  Phonemic awareness: phoneme or single sound identification, isolation, blending, segmentation, addition, subtraction, and deletion.
•  Phonologic awareness: word awareness, rhyme recognition, repetition, and creation of alliteration (same first letter to several words in a row), syllable counting or identification, onset, and rime manipulation (onset is the first sound in a word, and rime is the ending of a word.)
•  Phonics: the study of the relationships between sounds and words. Phonics includes:
  •  Alphabetic principle,
  •  decoding, orthographic knowledge (recognizing letter patterns that make up words and eventually progress to word recognition),
  •  encoding,
  •  and fluency.
•  Building background knowledge
•  Oral language development
•  Vocabulary building to develop lexical and morphological knowledge.
•  Instruction in writing
•  Instruction in comprehension
•  Reading  

To coordinate this transition in literacy education, the office of literacy, called the Wisconsin Reading Center, will be created, and housed in the Department of Public Instruction. In addition, there will be the Council on Early Literacy Curricula created to advise the Wisconsin Reading Center.

These new organizations will work with CESAs and school districts to bring in training and additional coaching to increase the implementation of these new curricula. There will be funding to help schools and teachers pay for the needed training in science-based literacy curricula and coaching for the teachers in their classrooms.

The Act notes that Lexia Learning Systems, LLC is an approved teacher training program, with the LETRS program offered to pre-K-3^rd grade teachers. Other approved teacher training programs can be found through the Center for  Effective Reading Instruction, including Orton-Gillingham and the Wilson method.

Institutions of teacher training in Wisconsin (colleges and universities) will be required to provide this training to their students. This requirement is to be in place by July 1, 2025. Teachers who currently teach in grades K-3 will be required to complete this training and be licensed with this new requirement by July 1, 2025.

Important for parents to know is that schools will be required to do screenings to identify pupils at-risk for dyslexia and reading delays. Students would be labeled at-risk if they score below the 25^th percentile on a universal screener or diagnostic assessment. Schools need to use an approved foundational skills screen for the four-year-old kindergarten screening. The screening is to be administered twice during the school year.

For students in grades K-3, the schools must use an approved universal screener at least three times per school year. Students who score below the 25^th percentile would then undergo a diagnostic assessment.

The diagnostic assessment will focus on the student's skill in the following areas:'

• Rapid naming
• Phonological awareness
• Word Recognition
• Spelling
• Vocabulary
• Listening comprehension
• For older students, oral reading fluency and reading comprehension are also assessed.

Each student found to be at-risk will have a Personal Reading Plan developed. These Personal Reading Plans will be monitored weekly to catch any issues in progress. Students must satisfactorily complete their plan by the end of 3^rd grade or won't be promoted to 4^th grade. Long before that, however, the school will implement more interventions, such as summer programs and more intervention time during the school year. A few exceptions exist for the 4^th grade promotion, such as limited English speakers or students with an IEP.

School districts must keep data on each student's progress and how the district is doing. With this data, which will continue to grow over the years, Wisconsin will be able to make sure that students can read and compete in the world.

Right now, The tricky thing is waiting for the system to be totally up and running. We do have to be patient since Wisconsin's 27,000 to 28,000 K-3 teachers need to receive the training. The trainers will come from out of state since Wisconsin has few accredited trainers. The state has put a deadline of 2025 for newly trained teachers and the start of the 2025-2026 school year for schools.