As of Tuesday, May 9, the Santa Barbara Unified School District’s elementary schools will be officially transitioning to a new method of literacy instruction. Fifteen years have passed since the last time the district updated how they teach students in grades K-6 to read and write.
The district’s Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the new curriculum Tuesday night. Priced at $1.7 million, the combination of English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum Wit & Wisdom and structured literacy program Fundations will be used to apply the “science of reading” in the classroom starting in the 2023-2024 school year.
Using the new reading program, students will be taught “phonemic awareness,” or how to sound out words based on the sounds of individual letters. It will replace the contentious “Whole Language” or “Balanced Learning” method that focuses on the use of context or the first initial of the word to determine its meaning.