Parents and taxpayers take it for granted-- when students go through years of public school, surely they'll master basic reading skills.
Not always.
Hard to believe, but a few students still manage to slip through the cracks.
News Specialist Nadine Wimmer reports.
It's not that they can't read at all. They can read some.
But here's what it's like.
If you tried to read a school sign in Spanish, you could sound it out, you might even know a few words.
But do you know what it means?
Not likely.
And that's what it's like for some students on the brink of graduating illiterate.
They go through the elementary years, graduate on to
middle school
and move toward graduation.
Yet, somehow, a few students get this far, and still have trouble reading a job application.
One student reads, "Ability to...effectively project a verity, a variety of.. characteristics."
He made it most of the way through high school before realizing his reading skills tested at the 4th grade level.
Reading a newspaper is a struggle.
"Top state financial regulators and many Utah legislators, legislatures appear ready to grant that wish," he read.
The student says, "I can read most words by sounding them out, look at 'em long enough." How well does he understand it? "Not well," he tells us.
Reading specialists, like Steven Lewis, say his problem is not uncommon.
We asked him if he sees students who come in with a high school diploma saying 'I can't read.' "Yes, like I say, most of them have found alternate ways to do it," Lewis says.
Many kids make up for reading deficiencies with their social skills, others hide it.
"Most the times I was trying to avoid questions the teacher would ask me, situations like that," the student says. When asked if he would ever read out loud in class, he replied, "No, never did."
But when illiterate students slip through the cracks, it leads to bigger problems later on.
One in ten Utahns have reading skills so low
they can't read instructions on a microwave dinner,
directions on an asprin bottle,
or locate an intersection on a street map.
Problems like these have called into question the automatic promotion policies of many schools.
There's a growing movement to make students earn their way to the next grade, to ensure they've learned the material.
Our student says, "I think there's a lot more students out there that ain't learning how to read right."
