Utah first lady Abby Cox on Wednesday met with Utah education leaders to talk about the need to meet the literacy crisis head-on and ways the state has worked to do just that.
First lady Abby Cox speaks during an event with district leaders and state policy makers to discuss adolescent reading intervention in Salt Lake City on Wednesday.
SB241 allocates $25.6 million for literacy coaching aiming, targets 80% proficiency by 2030 and introduces intervention measures. SALT LAKE CITY — Utah is no stranger to discourse surrounding early child literacy.
While the Beehive State generally performs higher than other states in terms of proficiency measures, its leaders still recognize — especially post-COVID — that it's a real issue that demands serious solutions.said Utah school teachers and administrators should focus enhanced attention not only on third-graders, the traditional benchmark for early literacy, but also on first-graders, where data starts spotting early literacy challenges in young students. Then, Utah first lady Abby Cox on Wednesday added to that discussion, speaking with Utah education and policy leaders about the need to meet the literacy crisis head-on and ways Utah has worked to do just that.
"We're not in the best place that we can be, and we're a little ahead of the national average; we always have been, but that still isn't great. We're in a moment where everybody's starting to realize this ... business community, educators, all of us coming together to realize there's an issue here," Cox said.during the 2026 legislative session, which committed $25.6 million to literacy coaching, increased the statewide goal to have 80% of third-graders reading at grade-level by 2030 and includes an intervention measure requiring struggling third-graders to repeat the grade — "except in cases of certain good cause exemption.
" "I know we can get 97-plus percent of our kiddos reading on grade level by third grade. We can do this," Cox said. She also emphasized the need to get "attention-sucking machines," AKA cellphones, out of classrooms — something top lawmakers in the state have made strides to emphasize.that essentially places a bell-to-bell ban on cellphones at Utah's K-12 public schools, unless a school or district opts for a looser policy.
The latest piece of legislation was built upon a similar bill passed during the 2025 session that set a default policy barring students from using their phones during class time. Despite those restrictions, many lawmakers and educators argued they didn't go far enough, which led to SB69.
"I don't think we all know enough about how wonderful this is going to be," Cox said, adding that data has shown library book checkouts have skyrocketed in schools that have instituted daylong cellphone ban policies. "I talked to a principal who, after the first day of going bell-to-bell, walked into his high school lunch room, thinking there was a fight, because there was all this chaos and noise ... and it was just communicating with each other, playing cards, bringing little games," Cox said.
"It was just beautiful to see, and I think we're going to see an incredible resurgence as we implement this statewide. "The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written. Audit: 'Ghost students' cost Utah's higher education system over $840K last year
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