As a Community Foundation with the goal of strengthening our community by creating opportunities for all who call our area home, we’re in a perpetual position of understanding and enhancing our local assets, one of the most important of which is education. 

While reading is a vital key to learning, one in five students lives with dyslexia, a common neuro-cognitive disorder that impedes reading comprehension. Last month was National Dyslexia Awareness Month, making this moment a fitting time to share some of the latest on the Community Foundation of Sarasota County’s Strauss Literacy Initiative. This regional effort focuses on helping all children to become proficient readers, with phonics as a central part of instruction to ensure that students exhibiting the characteristics of dyslexia are also supported on their learning journey. 

Implemented in 2018 on behalf of the estate of Ira and Patricia Strauss, the goal of the Strauss Literacy Initiative is to provide a pathway for all learners, especially those with dyslexia, to strengthen reading comprehension. This goal was inspired by Patti Strauss’s personal experience with dyslexia.

But to fund an ongoing initiative that would provide pathways for students of all ages, foundation leaders wanted to support partners in developing programs that go beyond screening individual students for dyslexia, but rather explore opportunities that support all readers. Learnings from initial pilot programs led us to focus on professional development for teachers, giving them the tools to empower all students year after year. Our aim is to support a series that could eventually lead to systemic change in literacy instruction with guidance from a phonics-based instruction connected to the science of reading. Working with Sarasota and Manatee districts, along with the Early Learning Coalition of Sarasota and State College of Florida, our foundation has supported each organization in pursuing their own gameplans for addressing literacy in a way that best works for their students as the teachers and administrators map their educational journeys.

This work comes amidst a broader legislative push from state governments across the United States to enact science of reading instruction in the classroom. An Education Week analysis from July 2023 found that roughly 32 states, including Florida, had “passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction” since 2013. This year, Florida passed legislation effectively banning the balanced literacy approach and instituting “evidence-based professional development activities” for teachers “grounded in the science of reading,” which is in line with the professional development that is being implemented at Sarasota County Schools.

For all the progress made, Strauss is still in its early stages, but preliminary data points are encouraging. Last year, Sarasota County Schools embarked on an effort to implement a small-group instructional framework with phonics-based instruction at four elementary schools, with training conducted by the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning. The program was so successful in its first year that it is now coming back for a second. This year’s program is multilayered, with 15 returning teachers and 17 new teachers starting from scratch. 

Data from last year’s program in the Sarasota district makes it clear that this is a strategy that works. Roughly 68% of participating second-grade students had met or exceeded grade-level expectations in reading by the school year’s halfway point. 

We continue to partner with schools to empower those who work within them to better support those who attend them. When people enter the pathway to learning that quality literacy instruction can provide, they learn more than language; they develop the critical insight and imagination that will bolster our community for generations to come.

Kirsten Russell is Vice President of Community Impact for the Community Foundation of Sarasota County.