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Literacy Is Our North Star

Literacy is our north star

 

Every child should be given the opportunity to pursue their greatest potential and a choice-filled life. Literacy is fundamental to that opportunity. Students, families, and communities expect their schools to give children access to literacy, and as educators we know that, if we do not give students access to this most inalienable right, somewhere along the trajectory of their lives, they will not have access to the knowledge, the experiences, the employment, the healthcare, the property, the civic-process, the self-advocacy, the relationships or the connections that they need and deserve because they could not read to the degree that they needed or deserved. The data tells us that this is true, and the data tells us that we can do better. So, as a district, we are turning toward the science that is telling us what we can do better and how we can do better. We are holding literacy as our North Star because its light leads our students to their freedom as individuals and their self-affirming place within the greater community.

What is Literacy?

Most might immediately define literacy simply as the ability to read and write, but more exactly, it encompasses listening and speaking as well. Someone who is literate can utilize or engage with language to acquire, synthesize, and integrate knowledge or to construct and communicate meaning so that they might successfully and confidently make sense of and interact with the world around them.