09/23/2026
🚨 DOTHAN, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ACADEMICS.
At Tuesday night’s Board meeting, our Curriculum & Instruction team presented beginning-of-year academic data that I believe our entire community needs to see.
These are beginning-of-year diagnostic results. They are not ACAP scores or an end-of-year report card. But “beginning of the year” should not be mistaken for “these numbers aren’t serious.”
📚 K–8 READING: 80% of assessed students are below grade level.
➗ K–8 MATH: 90% are below grade level.
And the depth of the gaps matters.
In reading, 36% are two or more grade levels below.
In math, 40% are two or more grade levels below.
At the high-school level:
➗ 81% of screened students in grades 9–12 are FAR below grade level in math.
📚 64% are FAR below grade level in ELA.
These numbers require urgency.
i-Ready is an adaptive diagnostic. As students answer questions, the assessment adjusts the difficulty to determine the level at which they are actually performing and identify the skills they have mastered and the skills that need improvement. Its placement levels are specifically intended to help identify the grade level of skills on which a student needs instruction.
So when significant numbers of students are identified as two or three or more grade levels below, we cannot dismiss that simply because this is the beginning of the school year. Those gaps did not develop during the first few weeks of school.
Take a close look at the screenshots I’ve included and find where your child’s school lands. Look at how many students are on or near grade level, how many are one grade level behind, and how many are two or more grade levels behind. Look by grade level as well.
These numbers represent children, not statistics.
And I want to be very clear: this is not about blaming our teachers or principals.
Academic challenges this widespread require us to examine the entire system surrounding our classrooms: staffing, teacher certification and experience, intervention personnel, instructional coaching, professional development, recruitment, retention, extended-learning opportunities and the resources being provided to our schools.
Technology has a role. Learning paths have a role. Professional development has a role. But none of those can replace teacher expertise, instructional capacity and high-quality instruction.
During Tuesday night’s presentation, we heard about work already underway, including PLCs, progress monitoring, Tier II and Tier III interventions, instructional walkthroughs, coaching, data talks, intervention blocks and before/after-school tutoring.
I appreciate that work. But I remain concerned that what we currently have in place may not be sufficient for the magnitude of the need reflected in this data.
There is another concern we cannot overlook.
During the presentation, the students who are one grade level behind were identified as our “biggest opportunity.” I understand why. Those students may be closer to reaching grade-level expectations, and we absolutely should provide the support necessary to help them close that gap.
But our strategy cannot focus primarily on the students who are closest to catching up while our most academically vulnerable students fall even further behind.
The students who are two and three or more grade levels behind need a targeted plan too. The depth of their learning gaps may require more intensive intervention, more instructional time, greater expertise and more frequent progress monitoring.
Every group of students needs a pathway forward. Our goal cannot simply be to move the district’s percentages. It has to be to move every child.
And that is where Board accountability matters.
I believe Dr. Askew and his administration must be held accountable for academic improvement. But this Board must be equally accountable for whether we give the superintendent and his instructional team the authority, personnel and resources necessary to produce that improvement.
We have already seen why this matters.
The Board ultimately approved five literacy turnaround specialists (late last school year), and I supported that investment because our students needed intervention. But the original request called for intensive literacy support across ten schools.
We now have beginning-of-year data showing significant need across schools both with and without those specialists.
That raises a question we cannot ignore:
Is the level of support we approved sufficient for the level of need we now see?
This is not about diminishing the work of the five specialists or the educators in those schools. It is about recognizing that five specialists cannot provide ten schools with the same level of intensive support originally envisioned.
And with 80% of assessed K–8 students below grade level in reading, we need a clear plan for how schools without a turnaround specialist will receive the intensive support their students need.
I believe Dr. Askew is doing the best he can with what has been provided. At the same time, I have serious concerns that decisions made at the Board level have limited his ability to implement interventions at the scale necessary to produce meaningful improvement.
We cannot demand dramatic academic gains while being unwilling to provide the capacity required to achieve them.
We cannot tell schools with extraordinary needs simply to do more with what they already have.
And we cannot allow another school year to pass and then act surprised if the end-of-year data confirms what the beginning-of-year data was already warning us about.
This requires urgency now.
As a Board, we should be asking: Do our schools have enough qualified personnel to meet this level of need? Are our interventions intensive enough? Are we recruiting and retaining the certified teachers we need, particularly in hard-to-fill areas? Are teachers receiving the coaching and training necessary to teach grade-level standards while also addressing significant unfinished learning? Are we monitoring students frequently enough to know whether interventions are actually working? And when the superintendent and instructional leadership identify additional resources that are needed, will this Board provide them?
This is not only an education issue.
When students approach graduation significantly below grade-level expectations, this becomes a workforce-development and economic-development issue for our entire community. These are the young people who will enter our colleges, training programs and workforce.
That is why I am sharing this data publicly.
Parents, find your child’s school in these slides. Ask where your child’s grade level stands. Ask what intervention is available. Ask how often progress is being measured. Ask what happens if your child is not responding to the intervention. And ask how that progress will be communicated to you.
And I encourage our entire community to follow what happens next. Watch the data. Attend meetings. Ask questions. Contact your Board representatives. Pay attention not only to the academic results, but also to the decisions we make about the resources necessary to change them.
We are still facing an academic crisis. Acknowledging the work underway does not require us to minimize the magnitude of the problem.
Our children do not have time for us to experiment with whether an insufficient level of support might be enough. And the children who are furthest behind cannot become casualties of a strategy focused primarily on those who can catch up fastest.
The response has to match the need. The resources have to match the need. And every student, including those with the greatest academic gaps, must have a credible plan for getting from where they are today to where they need to be.
🎥 The academic presentation begins at approximately 36:37, with the discussion continuing through approximately 1:23:08.
https://www.youtube.com/live/iC3pl8qx3R0?is=RVuc6HI1kwhrBXuQ
Here are the grade level files that were included as links in the presentation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_fhEJepUGD_JQaUqiv8wj9b-PCZlaY0J/view?usp=drivesdk
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cnSLJP123S0SeBEA7vMDg8TOulXS3Ne_/view?usp=drivesdk
