Elementary school students in Nevada are making incremental progress in reading proficiency, as the state approaches the implementation of a policy that retains students in third grade if they are not reading at grade level.

Across the past three school years, fewer elementary school students have been required to receive reading intervention services, and third graders are doing better every year in reading proficiency, according to state data released last month. But less than half of the more than 35,000 Nevada third graders read at grade level, and the latest data still largely lags behind pre-pandemic numbers, with some exceptions in Washoe County and public charter schools.

The state is three years from implementing its policy to retain underperforming third graders, and officials haven’t yet finalized rules on how to decide who will have to repeat third grade. In other words, it’s unclear what portion of the tens of thousands of third graders who weren’t reading at grade level this year would be held back under the eventual rule.

In interviews with The Nevada Independent, education officials touted recent initiatives aimed at improving literacy rates, such as the May release of an updated statewide literacy plan and the launch of a new program this month geared toward improving reading skills in Clark County. However, there have been some hiccups, including the recent end of a program to provide free books in Clark County and funding issues for nonprofits aimed at improving childhood literacy.

The state has multiple ways to measure reading proficiency. It has a test to determine whether any student who has not reached fourth grade must receive certain intervention services. Students in grades 3-8 also take a separate test every spring that measures reading and math proficiency.

Put together, the data reveals a clear picture: The state is making strides in improving early childhood reading proficiency — particularly in the most recent school year — but the data still shows a significant portion of students are not meeting proficiency expectations.

Alexander Marks, a spokesperson for the Nevada State Education Association, a major teachers union, commended the improvement in literacy but said “the pace is too slow to justify a harsh policy like retention.”

“We need to focus on policies that kind of lift our students up and provide the resources rather than just punishing them for circumstances that are out of their control,” Marks said.

Statewide, 45 percent of third graders in Nevada were proficient in reading during the 2024-2025 school year, an increase of more than 4 percentage points from the year before. 

The growth was even higher in Washoe County and state charter schools, where there was improvement of nearly 5 percentage points and 7 percentage points, respectively, from the year before.

“Those are huge gains,” said Mandy Leytham, who is an education programs professional for the Nevada Department of Education. “That’s a lot to celebrate and a lot to be optimistic about.”

However, statewide literacy rates are still slightly worse than before the pandemic, when more than 46 percent of third graders were proficient in reading. The decrease is particularly evident in rural areas, where literacy rates are 8 percentage points lower than before the pandemic.

That’s not the case in Washoe County and public charter schools, where third grader literacy rates have already surpassed those from the 2018-2019 school year.

“That’s encouraging signs that we’re moving in the right direction,” Washoe County Superintendent Joe Ernst said at an IndyTalks event earlier this month.

There are also decreases in students who have to receive intervention services.

About 40 percent of students faced that requirement in the 2024-2025 school year, a decrease of about 4 percentage points from two years earlier. Across the state, nearly two-thirds of all schools saw decreases in the share of elementary school students required to receive intervention. That included more than 70 percent of Washoe County schools and half of rural schools.

Read by Grade 3

The State Board of Education has been tasked with setting standards to determine which third graders will be held back once the law is implemented in the 2028-2029 school year. The board will also decide which exam will be administered to determine student proficiency. There are also alternative ways for students to progress to fourth grade without meeting the testing standards, such as by submitting a portfolio that demonstrates reading proficiency.

There is also no timeline for when the cutoff may be determined, said Tim Hughes, vice president of the state education board.

Because these decisions have yet to be finalized, there is little sense of how many students could be held back. Data from a similar initiative in Florida in the early 2000s showed that the number of retained third graders more than quadrupled in the first year of the program before beginning to decrease in following years.

The retention policy, initially created in 2015, was reinstated in 2023 under Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who said during his run for governor he would bring back the rule that had been removed three years earlier. Similar policies have been adopted in more than two dozen other states, but research is mixed about their effectiveness.

The retention requirement was part of Lombardo’s sprawling education bill in 2023 (AB400), which passed with only one legislator in opposition.

The policy is part of the state’s broader Read by Grade 3 program, an effort to improve childhood literacy by providing funding to school districts to implement certain intervention services for students in need. 

The Read by Grade 3 program has faced some scrutiny. A state audit of the program in 2023 found it was underperforming statewide, with literacy targets that were not ambitious enough. 

Still, the state has surpassed certain expectations, which aimed for about 43 percent of third graders being able to read at grade level in 2025, under an education accountability initiative under Lombardo.

Hughes, the board vice president who is also executive director of Teach for America Nevada, said in an interview that the requirement on its own tends to not lead to improved literacy rates, but that it can lead to progress alongside other supportive measures.

However, he also added “there’s a real danger” about blaming kids and families for something that might be outside their control.

“If you’re a child and you have not had access to high-quality instruction starting in kindergarten through third grade … you had no control over that,” he said. “If you had a long-term sub for a full year, you had no control over that. And so that is a little bit of a challenge of, ‘How do we make sure that kids got all the things in place that they needed?’”

There are also concerns about the impact this could have on physical space at schools. There is minimal research on the direct impact of retention requirements on class sizes.

“There’s a very practical concern that other cities and states have had to deal with of, ‘Do we have enough space?’” Hughes said. “You build schools for a certain number of students and expect that a certain number are going to move on to the next grade level, and so that’s a real question as well.”

Efforts to improve reading

Earlier this month, the Clark County School District announced a new program with Southern Nevada education groups called Read With Me NV.

The goal is to increase the county’s third grade literacy rate to 64 percent by 2030, which would be an increase of 20 percentage points from the most recent school year and double the rate from the 2020-2021 school year.

The effort will connect educators with each other and the latest research into literacy development. It is also aiming to connect families with existing resources and strategies, such as reading with their children daily, and will provide a book to new families with information on ways to improve their child’s reading skills.

“Parents want to help their kids, they know literacy is important but may not always know what all of these sorts of techniques are or what the strategies are,” said Hughes from Teach for America, which is participating in the program.

That announcement came a few weeks before the end of another program in Clark County. The Dolly Parton Imagination Library, which provides more than 18,000 books monthly to children younger than 5, is stopping after the expiration of a grant. Efforts to fund the program in the 2025 legislative session failed.

Elsewhere in Nevada, the United Way of Northern Nevada and the Sierra has a program called United Readers where K-3 students receive one-on-one guidance to improve reading abilities. The program helped about 1,000 kids last year. This school year, the rollout was delayed because of interruptions to the nonprofit’s government funding sources, but it re-launched this week — this time focusing on rural schools.

“Being able to focus on the rural counties that don’t have the resources … has been really, really cool for us to be able to reach other parts of Northern Nevada,” said Daniel Amaya, the organization’s marketing and communications director.

The group also runs the Dolly Parton Imagination Library up north — sending out about 8,800 books monthly — and has been able to continue its operations through a collaboration with other organizations despite the state funding lapse.

Amaya added that meeting kids where they are is critical to righting the literacy ship.

“Our curriculum is very much about how do we pull kids into a setting that makes them comfortable, how do we get back to the roots of things,” he said. “As opposed to, ‘Let's just pump them in with everybody else that might be performing at a higher level.’”