March 13, 2026, 4:26 p.m. ET
Waterford ― With her teacher holding the microphone, kindergartener Gloria DesJardin gently corrected her pupil: the superintendent of the Waterford School District.
The sound the letters “ck” make, she told him, is a two-letter sound. Poor Adam Martin had written just the letter “C” on his erasable board.
Standing corrected in front of a group of press and state education officials and State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko, Martin quickly added a “K” to his board for a correct answer of a combined “CK.”
Gloria was helping demonstrate the techniques used in her classroom at Haviland Elementary School to learn letters and sounds. The 5-year-old would say a sound, then Maleyko and Martin, with the help of two other students, would write it out on their board.
The lesson is part of a curriculum, called HMH Into Reading, that Waterford uses in all its schools. The program is rooted in what’s known as the science of reading, a way of teaching reading that aligns with brain science.
Maleyko, Chief Deputy Superintendent Sue Carnell and MiLEAP Director Beverly Walker-Griffea visited the district Friday to see the school’s curriculum in action, and to highlight the support teachers have received through a training called LETRS.
Maleyko is calling for that training to be mandatory for all kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers in the state. It would take a legislative effort, but Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s budget proposal includes the funding it would take to make it happen, Maleyko said. A total of $625 million in the budget is allocated for literacy initiatives.
“We think it’s important enough to get behind it,” Maleyko said.
Waterford is head of the game on literacy training
Waterford is ahead of the game ― the district has put upwards of 400 people through the training, including all elementary teachers.
The training has faced some resistance due to its length and intensity. The full program is two 60-hour sections. They are usually done over the course of two years.
Maleyko said he’s heard from superintendents worried about how to go about it, since they can’t require teachers to do work outside of the school day, and there aren’t enough hours in the day or substitute teachers to backfill classrooms if teachers have to take time during the day to do it.
But Waterford should be an example, he said, that it’s possible.
Old literacy program’s shortcomings prompted change
For the last few decades, Assistant Superintendent for Pre-K-5 Instruction Darin Holley said, Waterford, like many districts across the state and the country, used a model of reading instruction known as balanced literacy. It’s sometimes called “whole language” or referred to by its main method, workshops, or the authors of the specific curriculum a district was using.
Waterford was using a program called Units of Study, authored by Lucy Calkins out of Columbia University’s Teachers College.
It worked, Holley said, until it didn’t. He said it lacked the basis for teaching foundation skills that students need to learn to read. Some students figured it out on their own, others fell behind. When the district’s demographics shifted toward a lower socioeconomic demographic over the last decade, he said, the data showed more and more students struggling with the curriculum.
At the same time, a podcast called Sold a Story, from American Public Media, that highlighted problems with Units of Study and similar programs, “shook the team to the core” in Waterford.
“It really forced us to kind of self-assess and check our own beliefs about reading,” Holley said. “They started having a guilty conscience, like, what have we been doing?”
When the district received federal stimulus dollars during the COVID pandemic, they saw an opportunity to reinvent the way they taught. The district purchased Into Reading and tried to get teachers on board. It wasn’t always easy, Holley said.
“There was crying, there was gnashing of teeth, swearing,” he said. “People were not happy … especially that first year was a tough year.”
But it wasn’t long before they started seeing a difference in students.
“We saw a huge shift in every one of our buildings, every grade level, in growth,” he said. “And so when we shared that data with them, it was pretty hard to say that it wasn’t working.”
‘I’d do it all over again’
The curriculum, though, was only the first of two essential pieces, said Martin, the superintendent.
After the “what” had to come the “why.” That’s where LETRS training came in.
About 50 teachers had volunteered to take it a few years ago, he said. They came back “with their hair on fire.”
Kindergarten teacher Alyssa Korzym, who held the microphone while Gloria schooled her district’s leader, said she signed up to take the training before the district started offering stipends for teachers to complete it.
“I’d do it all over again,” she said.
LETRS has ” changed the way of my instruction,” she said. “And my kids’ growth this year is just incredible.”
Mary Craite, a reading intervention teacher and president of the Waterford Education Association, said her teachers have become hot commodities and could be poached by other districts that haven’t required the training yet.
“You don’t want to make this where you train teachers in one district and then another district pulls them,” she said. “I think the key to this is having everybody on board.”
What eventually got Waterford teachers on board, she said, was the stipend the district was able to provide, along with a few professional development days to lessen the out-of-school burden.
After that initial group took the training, money became available at the state to pay for the training itself, and Waterford still had stimulus dollars available to pay teachers a $2,500 stipend for each section of the training. Those who took the training in the initial group were also compensated.
Without that money, Martin said, across-the-board LETRS training wouldn’t have happened.
“We couldn’t have done it,” he said. “We would have never got it past our union, even though (Craite) believed that it was a good training. There’s no way she could have sold it to her members.”
Craite said initially there was some resistance from teachers who balked at the workload.
“At first people are like, ‘Are you crazy? How much work is this?'” Craite said.
But teachers always knew something was missing, she said. Kids often had gaps in areas like pronunciation, building vocabulary or their comprehension of what they were reading. LETRS, she said, gave teachers the skillsets to address all those areas.
“What I’ve seen is kids who are actually able to put it together,” she said. “I see their writing improving.”
Waterford expects all teachers to complete LETRS training
Now, Martin said, it’s an expectation that all elementary teachers complete it, although he can’t technically mandate the parts that would be out the school day. The in-person professional development days that are part of the school calendar, and are being dedicated to parts of the LETRS training, are mandatory.
Martin said those resources are essential if the state plans to try and mandate a training.
“We can do anything, but without the resources, no, I do not believe the states should mandate anything,” he said. “And I’ll say that about everything educationally.”
Maleyko has also called for a curriculum mandate, that every school would have to use a program vetted and approved by the state. The state currently has a list of vetted programs, but the dyslexia laws passed two years ago lack a full-throated mandate.
Maleyko said districts like Waterford, in the meantime, can be a model for the rest of the state even without strict mandates in place for curriculum or training.
“You’re having an impact on potentially 1.4 million students in the state of Michigan with this initiative,” he said.
jpignolet@detroitnews.com