Good afternoon, and thank you to everyone for joining the Education and Workforce Development Committee meeting.

My name is Councilmember Sheila Adam Stafford, and I serve as the chair.

Today is Monday, September 28th, 2026.

And we will have a roll call.

So

we

can do the roll calls fine.

Chair Adam Stafford,

president.

One member present at roll call.

Okay, thank you so much.

For our agenda today, we will have three briefings.

And I would like to thank all of our presenters for coming forward to present at this time.

So our first agenda item will be a briefing on the preliminary recommendations of the literacy commission, which is facilitated by our EWD committee staff.

And I will now turn it over to Dr.

Pirakin for the presentation.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Dr.

Run Perakin, Director of the Education and Workforce Development Committee.

As stated, EWD committee staff have planned and facilitated literacy commission meetings in coordination with Commission Chair Dr.

Felton Moss and County Council Chair Chris Laureata.

The commission has had four meetings thus far.

And today I'll I will be presenting preliminary recommendations based on the commission's work to improve literacy outcomes and close literacy gaps for county residents.

Just for some context, CR88 2025 established the literacy commission and CR 13 2026, extended the deadlines for the commission's deliverables.

Per the extension resolution, preliminary recommendations are due by September 30th, 2026.

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So where we are, uh the commission has met so far uh four times and has moved from information gathering towards identifying the highest leverage strategies.

And the goal is to better strengthen the literacy ecosystem in our county, as it is not just the responsibility of the school system to support literacy, and many entities play a shaping role in supporting literacy outcomes.

So at this stage, these recommendations are preliminary, and as the commission continues its work, they will become more action-oriented and specific as we prepare the final recommendations.

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The discussions have led to five recurring themes, and we'll explain these more in the in the uh recommendations.

First, instructional coherence, second, consistent implementation, third, stronger coordination across organizations, fourth, equitable access to resources, and then lastly, accountability.

And these themes helped to inform the recommendations that I'll present now.

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The

first preliminary recommendation is to strengthen evidence-based core instruction, targeted intervention and educator capacity.

So this concludes this includes a strong tier one instruction, implementing the science of reading, uh doing progress monitoring and aligned professional learning and coaching.

So these are not like new, these are best practices, but for you know, a variety of reasons, we're not always implementing strategies consistently across classrooms, and that's ultimately the goal is to be more consistent with these best practices.

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The

second recommendation is to strengthen the birth to third grade literacy continuum.

The goal here is to better connect kindergarten readiness, foundational literacy, screening and intervention, family support, such as book access, and measurable early literacy goals into one continuous pathway.

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The

third is to develop coordinated family and communist community literacy strategies.

So rather than relying on isolated events, the goal is to make family literacy an ongoing practice by giving caregivers practical, uh culturally and linguistically responsive tools that are connected to classroom learning and student needs.

Oftentimes our families want to do things, they just may not have all the tools, and that's something that also our uh EWD chair, um, Consumer Adam Stafford has advocated tremendously for.

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The

fourth recommendation is to establish sustained countywide literacy coordination framework.

So similar to the body that we have with the literacy commission, it's connecting all organizations that support literacy uh through an existing framework or a body that exists, or creating something to to accomplish that.

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The fifth recommendation is to create a centralized literacy resource and navigation system.

So the idea behind this is simple that if residents want to have access to literacy supports, they don't necessarily need to know which organizations provide them.

They're able to go to a centralized place and that we are coordinating to make sure that more people know about where those resources are.

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