As we first reported yesterday, Michigan's third grade reading scores are at their lowest point in the last ten years according to test results from the State Department of Education. Proficiency rates in English language arts dropped from 40.9% in 2023 to 39.6% in 2024. That means more than 60% of Michigan's third graders failed the reading tests last year. Here to discuss it is Detroit school board member Sherry Jay Dan Yogo. Sherry, thanks for being here. Thanks guys for having me on. So let's talk about what's causing this. Of course it's not that the third graders last year were any less bright than any other year any other generation. But the state is pointing to poverty and remote learning. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I mean remote learning has gone by the wayside for the most part over the last couple of years. Why is it that that's still having such an impact? >> You know, studies show that when we have students who lose our gap and during the summer and got to think about the impact of COVID that when they lose that time it takes almost 2 to 3 years in some instances to catch students up. And so that's why we want to make sure that we don't allow those gaps to exist. We saw what happened during COVID to no fault of our own. Many of our struggled with students who had to learn by no other platform than a virtual platform. That is not the optimal platform for our children to learn. They're in school now every day We're just starting school Back off again. And so having them in class, having that additional support to remediate the challenges that many of our students have found with reading and not just reading a lot of people sometimes get confusion and saying the children can't read the assessment with the instep is not just showing a child's ability to read or a word. It's their ability to comprehend and understand concepts, understand how the words fit together to make a story. And so that's what's important to understand And the difference between that. >> Yeah. Sherry There were a lot of districts really across the country that experienced that lag because of COVID and we know that each grade level builds off of the next. So how do you start the process of trying to catch up? >> I'm just grateful that, you know, one of the certainly no one is celebrating the fact that we had COVID. But as a result of us having COVID, we have a lot more funds now that allow us to hire more academic interventionists Detroit Public Schools And like you said, this is not just the issue. This is a state of countrywide, a national problem. But we've hired more academic interventionists and they're using programs like Wharton Gilliam to allow our students to get that support 45 to 50 minutes a day supporting them, helping them, giving them instructions on phonemic awareness, understanding how to decode words and having that support. But we're going to haveo do more as a community because many of our adults many of our parents grandparents who are raising the second generation of children some of them also have literacy challenges And we know that the building blocks of education and literacy begins at that 023 for more people who are reading at home ,families who are reading with their children. That's what it's going to have to take to have a campaign that deals with changing the culture of how we address and approach literacy. We want to start at home with the support of the community Maybe in our churches, in our places of faith as a program. But we have been able to hire more staff and retain more staff with higher salaries to be able to support our students . >> We're having these reading and academic job and Jerry we are very short on time but you mentioned funding. Can you tell us where we are? Can you bring us up to speed? In Detroit public schools with the settlement money from the 2016 lawsuit I know it was received more recently. Where are we on those programs After all of the community engagement? How is that going to be spent and how soon do you think we'll see a result from that? >> We're starting to see some results for that right now. We have community programs that $94 million that was passed. We're starting to see programing again allowing us to bring in more academic interventionists, allowing us to adopt programs that are led by community members. Let's read. We're seeing that implementation right now. We're actually meeting again next week to discuss some more of this during a special meeting for the Detroit School Board. But you're starting to see that implementation right now