You sense it before anyone says it out loud. Your child guesses at words, avoids the page, and the worry sits in your chest while the school tells you to wait and see. In Connecticut, that wait is getting shorter. Under the state’s 2023 Right to Read law, districts are screening young children for reading delays years before the old system would have noticed, and the early results suggest the shift is working.
Connecticut is screening young readers earlier than ever under its Right to Read law. Here are the questions parents ask most about what that means for their child.
Common questions
What is Connecticut’s Right to Read law?
Does a reading screener diagnose dyslexia?
How early should my child be screened for reading delays?
What should I do at home if my child is behind in reading?
Connecticut now screens K-3 kids for reading delays three times a year, long before the old system caught them. Some districts already see gains. Catch it early and you have time to help.
What Connecticut changed
The 2023 Right to Read law requires K-3 districts to use literacy curricula built on the science of reading and to screen every young child for early signs of trouble. Reporting by the Connecticut Mirror found districts now screen three times a year with tools like DIBELS and Acadience, flagging the specific skills a child struggles with, then responding with targeted help.
Outside the public system, demand from parents is climbing. The Southport School, a private school in Connecticut, offers free reading screenings through its outreach arm, the Southport CoLAB, and this spring partnered with Sacred Heart University to keep up. “It’s twice as many as last year,” said Benjamin Powers, Southport’s executive director and CoLAB founder.
The urgency comes down to timing. “From a developmental standpoint, we are much better off — exponentially better — by flagging these kids early,” Powers said. Reading delays often slip through unnoticed until fourth or fifth grade, the point where children shift from learning to read to reading to learn, and where falling behind in one subject quietly drags down the rest.
From a developmental standpoint, we are much better off — exponentially better — by flagging these kids early.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Why early screening matters at home and in class
A screener is not a label. The tablet check Southport uses runs 20 to 30 minutes and measures cognitive processes such as rapid automatized naming, how quickly a child pulls familiar names from memory. It produces a parent and teacher friendly report on whether a child is at risk for something like dyslexia. As Powers put it, it does not diagnose the condition; it “gives us an early marker so that we can just be proactive with the child, the teacher and the family.”
That framing matters, because a delay caught early is a delay you have time to work with. Reading draws on several systems at once, language, attention, memory and processing speed, and screening points to which one needs more practice rather than leaving a child to fail silently. Parents who want a clearer read on where their child stands often start with a free dyslexia screening before any formal evaluation.
The early data is encouraging. In Fairfield, 74 percent of kindergarteners read proficiently in 2023-24, and that figure nudged up to 78 percent by the end of first grade under the new approach. “You do expect implementation dips. We did not see them,” said Janine Goss, Fairfield’s executive director of PK-12 literacy.
Key takeaways
- The news: Connecticut's 2023 Right to Read law now screens K-3 children for reading delays three times a year.
- Why it matters: Early screening flags struggles years before fourth grade, when catching up grows much harder.
- What to watch: Progress hinges on trained interventionists and fair funding, both currently in short supply.
What to watch next
Screening only helps if a trained adult knows what to do with the results. Few new teachers leave college able to read a screener and plan from it, so districts are carrying the training themselves. Stratford partnered with HILL for Literacy, and its leaders spent a year learning to analyze the data and build lessons from it.
Two gaps bear watching. The first is staffing: certified reading interventionists are scarce, and the university programs that train them have shrunk. “There was a shortage in this area when I moved to Connecticut 16 years ago, and the programs to train them have shrunk, not grown,” said Rachael Gabriel, a University of Connecticut literacy professor, who told a state commission her own program has only 11 students. The second is uneven funding, since wealthier towns tend to have more resources for training than cities like New Haven and Hartford. Gov. Ned Lamont launched a Blue-Ribbon Commission this year to study reforms.
For families, the takeaway is steadying. The screening movement rests on a finding worth holding onto: with the right scope, sequence and time, most children learn to read. The home you build matters here, and you do not need a teaching degree to notice early, ask for screening and keep your child reading through the summer. Curious where your child’s reading actually stands? A short learning difficulties analysis is a calm place to begin.
You do expect implementation dips. We did not see them.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
There is something hopeful in a state deciding to look earlier instead of waiting for a child to fail. The old habit was to label a struggling reader and slot them into a category; the better path is to notice the one specific skill that is lagging and build it. Your attention at home is the earliest screener of all, and no one will advocate for your child the way you will. If you want a clear, full picture of how your child learns, the All Access program gives you the tools to build every reading skill, with a free trial and a personalized Action Plan you keep either way.
See what All Access gives your child
Take the dyslexia test
Is your child struggling in school?
Get your free personalized learning roadmap
You describe what you see at home. We turn it into a plan you start this week.
- Answer 5 short questionnaires about what you already notice, 30–45 minutes at your own kitchen table
- Your child sits no test and gets no score: nothing to schedule, nothing for them to dread
- You do the answering, the AI does the writing, and a person reviews it before it reaches you
- Access all 40+ courses instantly: reading, math, focus, processing and more, with new ones added regularly
Why we use AI, plainly: it writes from a knowledge base our team maintains and audits. We work through it line by line and pull anything the evidence stops supporting. The roadmap you get on Tuesday reflects what we corrected on Monday, and a human still reads it before you do.
Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
Your answers stay yours. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not hand identifiable assessment data to outside AI companies to train their models.
A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
References
- CT Mirror — CT schools double down on early detection to help reading scores
- Hartford Courant — Reading delay isn’t often caught until fourth or fifth grade. CT’s trying to change that
- Connecticut State Department of Education — K-3 Literacy Assessment
- Right to Read CT — Implementation Tracker
