Children who don’t read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma, according to an Annie E. Casey Foundation study.
And nationally, about 28% of U.S. adults scored at or below the lowest level of literacy on the federal government’s most recent adult skills assessment in 2023 — up from 19% in 2017, but still part of a nationwide decline in adult reading scores.
Early reading has become a focus for educators and lawmakers alike.
That focus brought U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan to Enfield Village School on Tuesday, where she read “Strictly No Elephants” by Lisa Mantchev to kindergartners and toured classrooms. The visit spotlighted a small, rural school working against that low literacy trend: Its reading results have outpaced expectations — a turnaround years in the making.
Much of it traces to changes that began in the fall of 2022, when Principal Jamie Winney arrived as an interim leader and found that reading instruction varied from classroom to classroom. Staff members worked through LETRS training, a science-of-reading program the state once offered free through federal COVID-relief money that has since expired, and built daily intervention blocks and data teams to track which students were falling behind.
On the 2025 state assessment, 77% of Enfield students scored proficient or better in reading, compared to 55% statewide.
“When you know more, you do better,” Winney said, describing why the district has outperformed others with similar demographics. “Not every school district understands what the data is telling them. We’ve worked really hard at making sure we know what it’s saying.”
Teachers say learning to read is harder than outsiders realize. Julie McHugh Kramer, a special educator with first- and second-graders, said it is anything but automatic.
“It truly is a process,” she said, and being read to aloud from infancy and playing with rhymes matter more than parents know. A child “coming to kindergarten not being able to rhyme is a huge indicator of potential learning difficulty,” she said.
For Superintendent Amanda Isabelle, the attention meant something to a district that often feels overlooked.
“Our small school is being recognized for the great things that it’s done,” she said. “We’re often a little too rural and left out.”
Hassan said Enfield earned the spotlight. “Children in this school do better than expected in terms of reading, and that’s because Enfield has really engaged with evidence-based literacy programs,” she said. The school is one of five in the state that she said have been recognized for exceeding literacy expectations.
She tied the visit to the READ Act, a bipartisan bill she co-leads with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the Senate health and education committee chairman. The bill would steer federal literacy grants toward science-based reading instruction and early screening; it cleared the committee in late July.
She described that approach as “everything from making sure that you’re using a phonics-based curriculum to having reading specialists actually in the classroom.”
She added, “Reading at grade level by the end of third grade is really important for all children. There’s a real correlation to that and building a successful future.”
Throughout the tour, students she visited in classrooms had questions of their own for the senator, from “What’s the hardest thing about your job?” to “What’s your favorite food?” Her answers: disagreements and sweet potatoes.
Two of her guides — Beauden Schuler, a 7-year-old second-grader, and Ira Dunkerton, a 9-year-old fourth-grader — traded favorites like “Dog Man” written by Dav Pilkey and “Goosebumps” by R. L. Stine. Asked whether they were proud of their teachers, they answered without hesitation: “Very proud.”