Marysville School District officials discussed plans to meet new literacy standards from the federal government and their own benchmarks at their July 16 meeting.

Washington state's waiver request for No Child Left Behind was approved on July 6 and will affect literacy evaluation.

The requirement that all students achieve proficient math and reading scores by 2014 has been waived, with a new focus on college readiness and closing the achievement gap, said Gail Miller, Marysville School District's assistant superintendent.

The new requirement specifies that the district's achievement gap must be cut in half by 2014. The achievement gap refers to the disparity in test scores between students of different races and income levels.

The district's goal is that race, ethnicity and income shouldn't predict test scores, said Miller.

Marysville Native American and Hispanic students have the largest gaps in test scores currently.

While white and Asian students have scored between 70 and 80 percent on third grade literacy evaluations the past six years, the Native American population has scored around 40 percent.

Hispanic students scored around 50 percent in 2008, 2009 and 2010, but jumped to around 70 percent on last year's evaluations.

African-American students have scored between 60 and 80 percent, but Miller notes that minority population is small here compared to other groups and is therefore more subject to random fluctuation.

The district also has its own literacy standards that it is trying to meet as well, with a goal of all students reading at grade level by the third grade.

The third grade reading level is an important point in student development, said Miller, because it correlates strongly to high school graduation.

The DIBELS measure (Dynamic Indicator of Basic Early Literacy Skills) shows about 70 percent of Marysville students meet benchmark proficiency in kindergarten, but that declines to 50 percent by the time those students get to third and fourth grade.

The Fountas and Pinnell literacy evaluations indicates about 60 to 70 percent of Marysville students passing at third grade.

Miller said the district should be shooting for 80 percent for these measures.

At higher grade levels, student literacy needs to be about reading more texts that are also more complicated, said Miller.

In middle school students need to be reading more, preferably 25 books a year.

"The research points out that in many middle schools kids don't even read 5 pages a day, yet alone 25 books a year," she said. "So one of the things we need to take a look at in our middle schools is do we have adequate libraries? Do we have tons of books that kids have easy access to?"

In high school Miller says the major problem is that students need to be better prepared for the highly complex texts they might be encountering in college.