In The Chair: President
The Senate agreed to the title of the bill.
Senator Irwin asked and was granted unanimous consent to make a statement and moved that the statement be printed in the Journal.
The motion prevailed.
Senator Irwin’s statement is as follows:
Literacy—reading capably and without difficulty—is essential to success in today’s world, and that’s why reading is one of the most fundamental skills that we seek to teach in our K-12 schools. But if you’re like me, you’ve looked at our literacy scores, you’ve compared them to other states and nations, and you’ve found them lacking and you’ve known that we have work to do. So, today I’m really happy that we’re coming together to do some of that work. For too many of our students, our current approach is lacking and is leaving them behind. That’s because as many as one in five kids in our state experience characteristics of dyslexia. Too many of these kids are falling through the cracks and what the language in these bills will do today to help these students is to bring more phonetic awareness and more decoding skills into the general education classroom. These bills also piggyback on our existing read-by-grade-3 assessments to do a better job of identifying these kids who are struggling with decoding skills and to provide the training necessary—the training and professional development, both in our colleges and at the district level—to our educators to make sure they have the skills to identify and intervene on behalf of these young learners on their path toward literacy .
I ask for your support today in voting for these important bills to improve literacy and to focus on dyslexic students and students who are experiencing characteristics of dyslexia, and I really appreciate the opportunity that has been afforded to bring these bills up today and to work in a bipartisan manner to do something good to promote literacy here in the state of Michigan.
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 381, entitled
A bill to amend 1976 PA 451, entitled “The revised school code,” (MCL 380.1 to 380.1852) by adding section 1531e.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: