North Carolina literacy law: Excellent Public Schools Act and LETRS

A note on North Carolina’s literacy framework

North Carolina’s current literacy framework is built around a single signature law: the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021, enacted as SB 387. The law is the operational center of the state’s K-5 literacy strategy, and it touches almost every component of how reading is taught, measured, and resourced in NC schools.

The centerpiece of SB 387 is the statewide LETRS training mandate. LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), published by Voyager Sopris Learning, is the two-volume professional learning sequence the state selected to operationalize structured-literacy alignment in classrooms. Between 2021 and 2024, NCDPI rolled out LETRS to all K-5 teachers and reading specialists in the state. The training is what gives the law its practical teeth — it’s the mechanism by which the abstract “science of reading” alignment becomes day-to-day classroom practice.

Alongside the training mandate, SB 387 established NCDPI’s approved K-3 core ELA materials list, universal K-3 dyslexia and reading-risk screening using NCDPI-approved tools, and Personal Education Plans (PEPs) for students reading below grade level. The law functionally supersedes the older Read to Achieve framework, which had focused primarily on third-grade reading proficiency and retention. The retention provisions persist in the broader policy environment, but the operational center has shifted: LETRS training, structured-literacy alignment, and the approved-curriculum list are now where district literacy decisions are anchored.

What this means for district adoption decisions

When evaluating literacy products for North Carolina use, district curriculum offices typically check:

1. LETRS-completion alignment — does the product’s pedagogy mirror what teachers are learning in their LETRS sequence? Structured, explicit, systematic phonics is the baseline. Products built around three-cueing or balanced-literacy methodologies will create friction with teachers who have completed the training.
2. NCDPI approved-curriculum list inclusion (for K-3 core) — is the product on the current NCDPI-approved list? K-3 core ELA materials must come from this list. The list is updated periodically and should always be checked directly on NCDPI’s literacy guidance pages.
3. Structured-literacy methodology — even outside the core, supplemental and intervention products should demonstrate explicit decoding, phonemic awareness, and orthographic mapping rather than meaning-based word-recognition strategies.
4. PEP-compatible progress monitoring — Personal Education Plans require ongoing progress monitoring data. Products that surface ORF, decoding accuracy, and intervention response data make PEP documentation substantially easier.
5. Screener compatibility — for K-3 universal screening, the instrument must be on NCDPI’s approved screener list. Supplemental practice tools should produce data that flows cleanly alongside the approved screener results rather than competing with them.

For supplemental and intervention purchases, ESSA evidence tier remains the key federal-funding gate. Storytime’s ESSA Tier 4 evidence rationale supports federal-fund procurement of supplemental practice tools alongside an NCDPI-approved core.

Common implementation challenges

Three issues come up repeatedly as North Carolina districts operationalize SB 387:

1. Translating LETRS knowledge into daily classroom practice. Teachers who have completed LETRS understand the structured-literacy framework deeply, but the day-to-day question — “which decodable book matches the specific phonics pattern I taught today?” — is operationally hard. Most decodable libraries are level-tagged, not lesson-tagged. Storytime’s decodable library plus on-demand generation cross-tags 2,000+ books to specific scope-and-sequence lessons, so a LETRS-trained teacher can find a perfectly-matched book in seconds instead of hunting.

2. ORF data for Personal Education Plans. PEPs require ongoing progress monitoring documentation, and ORF (oral reading fluency) is the standard measure most NCDPI-aligned districts use. Capturing ORF at scale across a classroom is operationally difficult — one-on-one timed reading is slow, and inter-rater consistency is hard to maintain. Storytime’s ORF assessment lets every student record reading passages with automatic WCPM and prosody scoring, producing PEP-ready progress data without consuming an entire small-group block.

3. Differentiation without leaving the approved-curriculum scope. The NCDPI-approved core anchors every K-3 classroom to a published scope and sequence — but student variation within a classroom is large, and PEPs require genuine differentiation. Storytime’s customizable-phonics-curriculum layer lets teachers issue per-student journey overrides that stay aligned to the core’s scope and sequence, so differentiation happens without breaking the class baseline or the approved-curriculum framing.