Third graders in Greater Clark County Schools just turned in the district's best reading scores in eight years, with the percentage of students passing Indiana's IREAD-3 exam climbing from 81.5 percent in 2025 to 84.7 percent in 2026. The 3.2 percentage point jump comes three years into the Jeffersonville-area district's shift toward a state-mandated reading approach built around explicit phonics instruction, while earlier approaches underemphasized foundational skills.
Karen Wesely, the district's director of elementary education, said the previous instructional model simply did not give students enough time on the fundamentals. According to WAVE News, Wesely said prior approaches did not spend enough time building foundational skills for decoding, fluency and comprehension. She added that the instructional shift required educators to rethink how they taught reading from the ground up.
Greater Clark County Schools has followed Indiana's legislated Science of Reading framework for the last three years, the station reports. More than half of the district's students, 57.5 percent, qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, according to the Indiana Department of Education.
Gains Spread Across Student Groups, But Unevenly
The improvement was not confined to the district's overall average. Black students in Greater Clark County Schools saw their proficiency rate climb from 69.0 percent to 81.0 percent, a 12-point jump, while multi-racial students rose from 78.5 percent to 85.9 percent and Hispanic students improved from 67.6 percent to 72.7 percent, per the district's figures relayed by the station. Students receiving free or reduced-price meals increased from 77.7 percent to 80.0 percent, and special education students rose from 55.6 percent to 63.1 percent.
Not every group moved at the same pace. English language learners in the district edged up only slightly, from 59.6 percent to 60.0 percent, while the other listed subgroup gains ranged from 0.4 to 7.5 percentage points. Districtwide, Greater Clark County Schools also reported results for its minority student populations.
The Legislative Push Behind the Numbers
The turnaround traces back to Indiana House Enrolled Act 1558, passed in 2023, which required every public school district to adopt Science of Reading-aligned curricula covering phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension while banning three-cueing instructional methods, according to WFYI. Three-cueing had previously encouraged students to guess unfamiliar words using pictures or context rather than sounding them out.
Lawmakers raised the stakes further with Senate Enrolled Act 1, which went into effect July 1 and was implemented during the 2024-2025 school year, requiring some third graders to be retained after three chances and remediation. WFYI reported that roughly 3,000 Indiana third graders, about 3.6 percent of test takers, were retained under the law's enforcement in fall 2025. Initial legislative estimates had projected between 7,000 and 10,000 students would be held back before recent statewide score increases narrowed that number.
The same law expanded IREAD testing into second grade starting in 2024, letting students who pass early skip the third-grade exam while giving those who do not a full year of targeted remediation and three chances to pass before reaching fourth grade, according to the Indiana Senate Republicans. According to the Indiana Department of Education, Grade 3 students who do not pass IREAD and do not qualify for a Good Cause Exemption are retained. The Indiana Department of Education said that beginning with the 2024-2025 IREAD test administration, a Good Cause Exemption could exempt an eligible student from retention if the student did not pass.
How Teachers Retrained for the Shift
To meet the new requirements, Greater Clark County Schools teachers received training in Orton-Gillingham approaches. The broader shift also affects teacher training and licensing. The district's teacher training is part of the broader shift toward early literacy.
Wesely said the district's continued progress depends on acting on student data, and Greater Clark County Schools has built professional learning communities where teachers analyze that data to identify foundational-skills gaps and target them with explicit lessons.
Still Trailing the State's 95 Percent Goal
Greater Clark County Schools' 84.7 percent pass rate still falls below both the statewide average and Indiana's target. Statewide, third-grade IREAD-3 passing rates reached 88.7 percent, a 1.5 percentage point increase over 2025, according to WFYI. The Indiana State Board of Education and Department of Education have set a goal of 95 percent third-grade reading proficiency statewide by 2027.
According to the 2015-2016 Ball State Annual Report hosted on IN.gov, 83.8% of Indiana public school students passed the IREAD assessment in 2015-16, providing an earlier statewide benchmark for comparison.
The district also has lower IREAD passing rates than some other area school districts, WAVE News noted, even as its multi-year trajectory shows steady improvement. For a district where more than half of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the climb from 81.5 percent to 84.7 percent in a single year represents the kind of momentum state officials have been pushing every Indiana district to replicate as the 2027 deadline approaches.
