York Region District School Board
Ontario, Canada

The York Region District School Board, a diverse and growing school district in the Greater Toronto area, currently has 161 elementary schools and 31 secondary schools, with over 113,000 students and 8,800 teachers. York Region has implemented Reading Recovery since 1995 and has achieved at least 20% coverage of all Grade 1 students since 2000.

York Region board’s director of education, Bill Hogarth, established literacy as the system focus and positioned Reading Recovery as the early intervention within the System Comprehensive Literacy Plan. Hogarth made an impact statement: “Every child will read by the end of Grade 1” and proposed that “… we have a moral imperative to teach all children, including those who are lowest achieving in Grade 1, not excluding any child for any reason.”

Senior management, working with the board of trustees, established Reading Recovery as policy and set the target of providing Reading Recovery for all students who need it. The discontinuing rates (former lowest students who met grade-level expectations after a full series of Reading Recovery lessons) have averaged 88% with a range of 85–91%.

Reading Recovery teachers are leaders in literacy and are members of the schools’ literacy teams, working as or with literacy coaches in the schools to build teacher capacity in early literacy. Reading Recovery is written into the board’s Plan for Continuous Improvement, and York Region District School Board has seen progressive increases in the percentage of students reaching the Ontario government’s standard for reading and writing among Grade 3 and Grade 6 students.

York Region School Board Director of
Education, Bill Hogarth.

Since 1995, York Region District School Board
has made Reading Recovery available to Grade
One students who need help with early literacy.

York Region District School Board's Reading
Recovery teachers are members of the
schools' Literacy Teams.