Jason Swensen is a Deseret News staff writer on the Politics and the West team. He has won multiple awards from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists. Swensen was raised in the Beehive State and graduated from the University of Utah. He is a husband and father — and has a stack of novels and sports biographies cluttering his nightstand.
SALT LAKE CITY — It's a crucial moment in Utah for K-12 education.Literacy, technology in the classroom, social media and parental involvement are just a few items on an evolving list of challenges facing the Beehive State's students, educators, parents and policymakers.
Earlier this year, Deseret News Executive Editor Doug Wilks sat down with Utah first lady Abby Cox and a diverse collection of educators, policymakers, parents, writers, mental health professionals and business leaders for a roundtable discussion on education — and what needs to happen to best serve Utah kids.Doug Wilks: A recent Gardner Policy Institute report identified education challenges, particularly with K-12 literacy and reading. Where do we go from here? What do we need to do?Abby Cox: I had a conversation with Sen. Ann Milner following last year's Deseret News education roundtable discussion. She said to me that if you really want to do something on education, something meaningful, you really need to start thinking about third grade literacy.How can we really make sure that that comes to fruition? How can that be implemented to help teachers?This is not a failure of education and educators. This is a community problem. We see this across the nation. Our educators are working tirelessly. But as a community, we've got to step in and help.We're trying to get the attention of parents who maybe don't know how to get their kids ready to read. We can help. Maybe there are opportunities for businesses to volunteer.Wilks: Why are half of Utah third graders not reading at a proficiency level?Molly Hart, Utah State superintendent of public instruction: It's not that they can't read. That's important to know. Sometimes we oversimplify some statistics and the ways we measure things.If you go into a third grade classroom, you are not going to find 60% of the students as illiterate. That's not what 40% reading on grade level means. So we have to do a better job in education of communicating what the message and what the metrics are.But that is not to minimize the challenges that we have. We need to do better. There isn't a single student that should leave third grade without the skills to move forward.It's important that we are transparent about what our students can and can't do and what they need to be able to do to keep the most number of doors open for them — whether it's college, career, military, or whatever they want to do to support the
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