By Linda Conner Lambeck

WESTPORT — School district school officials will seek legal counsel following the state’s denial of its Right to Read waiver application.

Supt. of Schools Thomas Scarice, in an email, called the situation a “chaotic mess” and a “haphazard process.”

He said he does not see building any of the state required programs into the district’s 2024-25 budget at the present time. The programs range in price from $165,039 to $1.7 million, according to the district.

Guidance from Shipman & Goodwin, the district’s legal firm, will be sought on what appeals process there might be as well as the state invitation to sit down one on one with the district, Scarice said.

The Board of Education won’t discuss the situation until district administrators are clear on the appeals process.

“In a wait-and-see approach until we get further guidance,” Scarice said.

For its part, the state is sticking with its determination that the evidence provided by Westport school officials for review did not show alignment with the areas of reading outlined in legislation passed in 2021.

The law required all local school districts in the state to adopt one of several approved reading programs that are said to be evidence and scientifically based or demonstrate that its method of teaching is as good.

In all, 85 districts in the state applied for a waiver. Of those, 17 got them and another four got partial waivers. Some 39 districts were told they must add or substitute part of their reading programs and 25 — including Westport — were not approved.

In a two-page letter to Scarice dated Dec. 1, state Commissioner of Education Charlene M. Russell-Tucker tells the district it must select from a list of approved K-3 reading curriculum models or programs. Partial implementation is expected in the 2024-25 school year and fully implemented in the following year.

Starting July 1, 2025, the district needs to report every two years to the Center for Literacy Research and Reading Success detailing the models or programs it has adopted.

Among acceptable programs are a series of language arts curriculum called Great Minds, another called Bookworms from Open Up Resources and a third called ReadyGen, by Savvas Learning Co.

So far, the state has not compiled a list of programs districts are using. That is expected by July 2025.

Accompanying the letter to Scarice was said to be a completed Waiver Application Review Tool that documents the state’s findings and identifies areas in which the legislative requirements of materials submitted by Westport were not met.

That two-page document, provided by the state, says the district provided an overview of a collection of instructional programs that is uses, but that it was unclear to the reviewer how those programs worked together as a comprehensive curriculum.

When asked to provide reliable and valid evidence showing that the curriculum would support students in achieving satisfactory reading progress, the state document said Westport offered research articles that support the reported practices produced by the companies it uses or articles at literacy websites, but no empirical, peer-reviewed, independent studies.

The document goes on to say that some programs the district uses to teach phonemic awareness is an approved supplemental program, but that other materials did not meet expectations when it came to phonics, letter naming fluency, vocabulary or reading comprehension.

Scarice called the state waiver denial to the district unclear and that the evaluation tool changed during the waiver process.

He added that communication between the district and state was sparse.

According to the state, the district’s review was completed on Sept. 28 and that district officials met with the state to go over it on Oct. 27.

The district’s application for a waiver was said to be 120 pages long and provided what the district said was evidence that its literacy programs were evidence-based, scientifically based and focused on the competency in oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, rapid automatic name or letter name fluency and reading comprehension.

The school board was told last January that the state’s attempt to dictate which programs the district used amounted to overreach.

“Mandating boxed programs or software without regard to the actual individual students in front of a teacher is an affront to the professional judgment of educators,” a memo from Scarice to the school board stated at the time.

Westport third-graders regularly out-perform peers in most other districts on the state’s language arts test.

In Westport, 73.8 of third graders scored in the proficient range, which is 10 percentage points lower than the year before, but still among the highest in the state.

Statewide, 54.5 percent — approximately 19,500 — of Grade 3 students statewide were not proficient in English Language Arts.

The intent of the legislation, according to state Department of Education officials, is not about test scores.

“The intent of the legislation is to ensure a curriculum or program being used is comprehensive and aligned with all the areas of reading,” said Matthew Cerrone, a district spokesman. “In doing so, all students shall receive explicit and systematic instruction in the foundational reading skills necessary to be proficient readers who are able to read to learn.”

He said a blind review process was used to determine if the reading models or programs waiver-seeking districts used were robust alternatives to ones approved by the state’s Center Literacy Research and Reading Success.

Then, waiver determinations were said to be made by Russell-Tucker in consultation with the director of the center after one-on-one interviews with district representatives.

Freelance writer Linda Conner Lambeck, a reporter for more than four decades at the Connecticut Post and other Hearst publications, is a member of the Education Writers Association.