The St. Louis branch of the NAACP has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, calling for its help in addressing low literacy levels across various school districts, including public and charter schools in the St. Louis region.
Branch President Adolphus Pruitt said Tuesday the department should look into the disparity between how students in areas with high poverty rates perform on literacy tests and how students in more affluent areas perform.
“We often try to point to the St Louis public schools, or the inner city in the ring schools, as one of the problem areas, but from our analysis, all the districts within the city of St Louis, St. Louis County, including the charter schools, have issues as relates to reading, and especially as it relates to the reading levels of Black and brown children,” Pruitt said.
Pruitt said he wants the department to help schools boost literacy scores for Black and brown students. Both public school systems and charter schools could better serve kids, he said.
“We have to develop a metric of [where] we think all school districts are now, and where we think they need to incrementally be over the next five years to solve this problem,” he said.
Pruitt also called on community members to support existing literacy programs, create new initiatives and think outside the box when it comes to storytelling workshops and community book drives.
