HIDOE awarded 60 million in five-year Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant

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​HONOLULU - The U.S. Department of Education has awarded the Hawaiʻi Department of Education (HIDOE) a five-year $60 million grant aimed at advancing effective, evidence-based literacy practices in public schools. This follows a nearly $50 million five-year Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) Grant received in 2019. Language arts proficiency is a key performance indicator under the Board of Education's 2023-29 Strategic Plan.

The purpose of the CLSD grant is to support states in creating comprehensive literacy programs to advance literacy skills, including pre-literacy skills, reading, and writing, for children from birth through grade 12, with an emphasis on disadvantaged children, English language learners and children with disabilities.

Since the 2019 CLSD grant award, Hawaiʻi public schools have improved in English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency from 2021 to 2022 by 2 percentage points and overall scores have held steady at 52% since, according to Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA) results. There were no test scores available in 2020 due to COVID. On this standardized assessment, Hawai'i leads the nation in academic recovery from the pandemic in ELA and is tied with Idaho for the highest SBA proficiency rate in language arts for the 2022-23 school year. The recent gains are part of a longer, steady trend of improvement on The Nation's Report Card, or National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Between 2003 and 2022, Hawaiʻi has moved its students into the top tiers in fourth grade reading from 44th to 9th place, and in eighth grade reading from 50th to 25th place on the NAEP.

Subgrants will be distributed to complex areas through a competitive grant process to develop comprehensive and community-specific literacy plans aligned to the state's Comprehensive Literacy Instruction Plan.

• 5% of the grant funds to be used for the realization of state objectives such as developing a working group to review the Hawai'i State Literacy Plan;
  

• 40% to HIDOE complex areas to be used for K-5 initiatives such as identifying students needing intensive, supplemental, accelerated and explicit literacy interventions and coordinating pre-kindergarten-to-kindergarten transition;
  

• 40% to HIDOE complex areas to be used for grade 6-12 objectives like emphasizing the needs of students with disabilities and multilingual students, screening and intervention for dyslexia and evaluation for middle and high school readiness;
  

• 15% to be used for birth to age 5 focus areas such as phonics awareness, letter recognition, high-quality professional development in literacy practices with a special emphasis on supporting multilingual children and children with disabilities.
  

Requests for Proposals will be solicited during fall 2024 for school year 2024-25 implementation. HIDOE has received $5.14 million for the period beginning Oct. 1, 2024, which is the full amount requested for the first year of the grant. In 2019, six complex areas received CLSD subgrants.

Click here for more information on the Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant.