By Kyle Roberts
Lincoln Parish students who could not read at grade level when school started last fall were the exception by the time it ended, according to a Louisiana Tech University analysis presented to the Lincoln Parish School Board on Tuesday during the September session.
The report, the second annual review of the district’s foundational skills literacy curriculum, tracked 1,823 kindergarten through third grade students across three rounds of DIBELS testing: the beginning of the year in fall 2025, the middle of the year in winter 2026 and the end of the year in spring 2026. DIBELS, short for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, sorts students into four bands — well below benchmark, below benchmark, at benchmark and above benchmark.
At the start of the year, 906 students, roughly half the group, were reading below or well below benchmark. By spring, 1,302 students were at or above it. In percentage terms, the share of students reading at or above benchmark climbed from 50% to 72% over the course of the year.
“The big picture is overwhelmingly positive,” said Dr. Dustin Whitlock, interim department chair of curriculum, instruction and leadership at Louisiana Tech. “We continue to see literacy growth across the district in students that are kindergarten through third grade.”
The number of students reading above benchmark nearly doubled, rising from 394 in the fall to 718 in the spring. Students in the lowest band fell from 590 to 326.
Measured against the prior year, the district’s position improved even as the study grew. In 2024-25, the review covered kindergarten through second grade and 1,343 students, and 31% of them finished the year short of benchmark. This year the study added third grade and roughly 480 more students, and that figure fell to 28% — 516 students who ended the year not yet reading at grade level.
The district measures itself against the rest of Louisiana as well, and by that yardstick Lincoln Parish has moved about 20 places in two years.
“Since our partnership with Louisiana Tech, implementing the UFLI Foundations curriculum, we’ve seen our DIBELS data just increase dramatically,” said Michelle Thrower, K-2 facilitator for Lincoln Parish Schools. “We always look at our state rankings. We want to know, where are we stacking up with everybody else? When we started, the baseline data, I believe we were like 32nd in the state. We were middle of the pack. And then after one year of implementation, we moved up to 22nd. So we moved up 10 places. And then this past school year, we moved up to like number 11 or 12. So another 10 spaces.”
“We feel like that is very strong evidence that what we’re doing is working for our students,” Thrower said.
“UFLI has given our teachers a consistent, research-based approach to early literacy instruction, and we are seeing the impact of that consistency in our classrooms and DIBELS performance,” Superintendent John Young said.
Researchers also reported effect sizes for each grade, a measure of how much of the change can be attributed to the instruction rather than to ordinary development. On the scale used in the presentation, which draws on education researcher John Hattie’s work, anything at or above 0.4 falls in the range Hattie labels desired effects. Every grade in Lincoln Parish cleared it: kindergarten at 0.58, first grade at 0.41, second grade at 0.76 and third grade at 0.63.
Kindergarten produced the sharpest turnaround. Of the 506 kindergartners tested in the fall, 383 — 76% — were below or well below benchmark, with 274 of them in the lowest band. By spring, that combined figure had dropped to 26%, and the share reading at or above benchmark rose from 24% to 74%. Nearly half the class, 241 students, finished above benchmark.
First grade followed a similar shape on a smaller scale, moving from 61% at or above benchmark in the fall to 76% in the spring, the highest end-of-year rate of any grade. Second grade climbed from 60% to 70%. Third grade, in its first year in the study, went from 61% to 66%, the smallest gain in the district, and finished with 153 students — one in three — still short of benchmark.
The presentation flagged third grade as an area of emphasis going forward, along with pre-K on the other end. Researchers listed phonological awareness as a foundational skill that could be strengthened before students arrive in kindergarten, while also noting that third graders only took the DIBELS while the UFLI foundational literacy curriculum was only used in certain circumstances this past school year. In 2026-27, UFLI will be used across the board for district third graders.
That distinction is what researchers found most encouraging in the third grade numbers.
“One of the biggest takeaways for us this year is that we did see students that were in third grade that did not receive the full intervention of the UFLI foundational literacy curriculum still continue to grow based on their experiences in the curriculum last year,” Whitlock said. “What we think we are seeing is that students getting these foundational skills and setting them on a positive trajectory at an early age is going to continue their growth across their time in the different grades as they move forward.”
On the district side, Thrower said third grade rose to the top of the list for a second reason: the state’s third grade retention requirements.
“Third grade kind of stood out as an area, and especially with the law that they passed about third grade retentions,” Thrower said. “And also we started looking into, could we improve student outcomes if we focused on our pre-K students as well. Could we improve kindergarten readiness of some of our students that start with us in pre-K?”
That thinking shapes what the district plans to do this year.
“Going forward, we’re continuing the work in grades K, one and two. We’re continuing to train new teachers, new hires, in UFLI, and make sure that that curriculum is being implemented with fidelity,” Thrower said. “But we’re expanding it into third grade and pre-K. And our goal there is to improve our student achievement data in both of those areas.”
One pattern in the data repeated itself with unusual consistency. At each grade transition, the share of students below or well below benchmark rose eight percentage points between the spring test and the following fall’s. Kindergartners who finished 2024-25 at 31% below benchmark returned as first graders at 39%. First graders who ended at 32% came back as second graders at 40%. Second graders who ended at 31% returned as third graders at 39%.
Whitlock said the flattening in the growth curve was expected, and that the district’s rising floor is part of the explanation.
“As you do in all circumstances like this, we start to see the growth slow down a little bit, but it is still moving in a really positive direction and with higher starting scores,” Whitlock said. “It’s going to be an important opportunity for us to strategically look at specific targeted areas to make sure that we continue that growth as we move forward.”
The review also broke results out by student group. Special education students showed the widest gap: 46% were well below benchmark at the end of the year and another 13% were below it, though the combined figure improved from 63% a year earlier to 59%. Researchers recommended continued teacher training and more implementation support, including assistive technology.
Economically disadvantaged students, the largest group in the study at 1,196 students, ended the year with 64% at or above benchmark, up from 60% the year before. That group grew by 322 students year over year, and the share reading below benchmark still fell.
English learners posted the strongest results of any subgroup, with 81% at or above benchmark at year’s end and half the group above it. Among African American students, 61% finished at or above benchmark, up from 59% the previous year. Hispanic and Latino students finished at 72%, and students categorized as other race at 70%.
Whitlock framed the project as three years of separate questions, each building on the last.
“In year one, we really wanted to answer the question, does implementation of this curriculum correspond with improved student performance?” Whitlock said. “From the data we collected in ’24-’25, we can answer that question a resounding yes. In year two, we wanted to understand, is that improvement sustained? And again, the data tell us yes, that improvement is sustained and is growing. But also in year two, we wanted to understand where the challenges are.”
The answer to that last question, he said, was pre-K on one end and third grade on the other.
“As we go into year three, we start to ask the question of where is this not working across the district and what’s next as a part of this work,” Whitlock said. “The question isn’t “Do we see growth?” Now the question for us in partnership with Lincoln Parish is to answer the question, do the patterns of growth really indicate that our current approach is sufficient for the next stage of improvement?”
The work is a partnership between the district and Louisiana Tech’s College of Education and Human Sciences, built around the University of Florida Literacy Institute’s UFLI Foundations curriculum. The project pairs the curriculum with tools developed through the university’s early literacy research work and places Tech preservice teachers in parish classrooms. The team that presented the findings included Dr. Libby Manning, Whitlock, Dr. Kimberly Kimbell-Lopez, Dr. Julie Cappo, Dr. Miranda Allen and Ms. Megan Hunt, who directs Tech’s Center for Literacy and Learning, launched in June.
The end-of-year figure in the report matches the number Young cited when the board set its targets for the current school year in August. Young told the board then that district DIBELS proficiency had risen from 50.4% to 71.6% over the course of 2025-26, and the board adopted a goal of reaching 75% this year.
“We are grateful to Louisiana Tech for investing in our teachers and students,” Young said. “This partnership demonstrates what is possible when a school system and university work together with a shared commitment of improving literacy and changing the trajectory for the students of Lincoln Parish Schools.”
Researchers told the board the next phase of the work moves from district-level numbers to individual classrooms. Planned areas of study include how faithfully the curriculum is being implemented at each school, progress monitoring at shorter intervals, and a classroom-level analysis set to begin in fall 2026. The team also listed pre-K, third grade and adolescent literacy as grade levels the project could expand into.
“One of the things that we are excited about being a part of is the new vision that Superintendent Young has put into place to continue to move literacy scores in a positive direction,” Whitlock said. “We know that literacy problems become more complex as a student gets older, and so we want to continue to support the district and to see what the next phase of this project looks like.”
Thrower said the district wants that circle drawn wider than the school system and the university.
“Teaching students how to read is definitely a partnership. It’s a partnership, a community effort,” Thrower said. “It’s a partnership between the school system, we’ve got Louisiana Tech involved, but we also want other community members involved. Parents, business leaders that want to come in and read to our children. We just want our students exposed to literacy at all different levels in different ways.”
“We do value partnerships across the board,” Thrower said. “With anyone that wants to be involved, they can reach out. And if they’re wondering, how could we help support? Give us a call. We’d love to chat with you about that.”
