Amidst ‘literacy emergency,’ schools benefit from digital reading tool

To address learning gaps caused by COVID and to make reading more accessible, the Delaware Department of Education has since 2021 used federal pandemic relief funds to establish the Delaware Accelerate Learning Collection, a shared statewide digital book collection available to all K-12 public schools across Delaware through a digital reading app called Sora by OverDrive.

“During the pandemic, when everything shut down so quickly, we knew that our students needed access to materials, so this was really born out of that,” Chief Academic Officer Monica Gant said.

“We really saw it as one of those places where we could provide equitable access to all students, 24/7, no matter where they were,” added Director Kathy Kelly.

The DALC is one of the most expansive statewide digital school libraries in the country, housing more than 17,000 e-books and audiobooks, including a wide range of popular books, comics and magazines; authentic and translated texts in languages other than English; and high-quality curriculum books adopted by Delaware’s local education agencies. It can be accessed on any mobile device or computer, allowing kids to access reading material anywhere, any time.

It also offers monthly curated mini collections spotlighting a wide range of state legislation and key topics like Black History, women’s history, LGBTQ+ communities and the Holocaust. Notably, since the topics are selected based on state-level legislation, they shouldn’t be impacted by federal legislation and curriculum restrictions.

Now several years in, the DALC has proven to be a success.

It has reached more than 144,000 students across 221 Delaware K-12 schools and has driven a 15% increase in average reading time per student, according to data from a 2024 Sora report. It surpassed 1 million checkouts in 2023 and has seen more than 2.4 million total checkouts to date.

“We’re really optimistic about how engaged our communities are in literacy,” Gant said. “Everyone wants to partner together to solve literacy challenges in our communities.”

The progress comes at a critical time.

In January this year, Gov. Matt Meyer and Secretary of Education Cindy Marten declared a literacy emergency following the release of Delaware’s scores on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The state’s average eighth-grade reading score hit a 27-year low.

Additionally, according to the World Population Review, in 2024, 45% of Delaware students were reading at a level below the benchmark for their age. In comparison, the average statewide rate among all 50 states plus D.C. was 41%.

While the DALC was developed as a short-term resource to assist students during the pandemic, its usage increased post-COVID. Now that the department’s pandemic relief funds are nearly out, though, they will no longer be able to sustain statewide school access to the resource.

From the start, the department has provided teachers with professional learning resources to help bridge the long-term sustainability issue. In other words, by giving teachers the knowledge they need to effectively navigate and facilitate student engagement with Sora and the DALC, they are enabling them to continue using and benefiting from the resources, even after the state funding runs out.

According to Kelly and Gant, many school districts across the state were already using Sora prior to the pandemic and the creation of the DALC, and many have already committed to some sort of continuation moving forward. 

In the future, Kelly and Gant said, if the department finds some other kind of state funding to support this resource, they would certainly be interested in pursuing it. In the absence of that, though, they hope for districts and charters to be able to establish their own partnerships with OverDrive, and they’re working with them to identify potential sources of money at their discretion to fund those partnerships.