For most students, learning to read follows a familiar path. For the 120 students at the Holy Childhood, that path has never been straightforward. Placed by public schools whose programs cannot meet their needs, these students, ages 5 through 22 from 40 different districts across New York, arrive with intellectual and developmental disabilities that most literacy programs are not built to address. Some communicate through AAC devices. Others are just beginning to connect letters to sounds for the first time. On June 11, the school opened its classrooms to share what happens when educators refuse to accept that premise.
Primary, middle, and high school classrooms each reflect structured literacy instruction adapted at every level. It is more than a single lesson: it is a progression of learning with the Reading Horizons® framework thoughtfully adapted in each classroom to meet students where they are: Mirrors helped students see the shape of their mouths as they formed sounds. Microphones encouraged vocalization. Music was woven through lessons to build rhythm and pattern recognition. AAC devices, sign language support, letter magnets, and body movement all played a role. Speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists work alongside classroom teachers, and the whole team convenes monthly to review data and refine what is working.
The school piloted Reading Horizons® before moving to full implementation two years ago. Progress is tracked three times annually using the Reading Horizons® phonics screener, which measures each student’s growth in phonemic awareness, phonics, and letter and sound recognition against their own starting point, not against standard benchmarks.
The most recent results, collected from 35 students between September 2025 and January 2026, show meaningful gains across both middle and high school classrooms. High school students improved an average of 27.3% in consonant sound recognition and 47% in short vowel proficiency over that period. Middle school students showed a 17.1% average gain in consonant sounds and a 35.3% increase in short vowel proficiency.
“What Reading Horizons gave us was a place to start, an evidence-based, multi-modal foundation we could build on and make our own,” said Donna Moscicki, Director of School Program, Holy Childhood. “And what we have watched happen since then is nothing short of remarkable. Students reading full passages. Families calling us because their child recognized a word on a sign in the grocery store. A little girl making a sound into a microphone that no one knew she had in her. Every child has more inside them than the world has thought to ask for.”
The instruction itself is structured, systematic, and built for students who have been left behind by programs that were not designed with them in mind. Before Reading Horizons, the school’s literacy instruction was inconsistent across classrooms, with students largely relying on individual computer programs that offered little teacher-led structure or human connection. The shift to a program grounded in structured literacy changed that. Now, every classroom in the building follows the same instructional sequence. Every teacher uses the same language. Students who move between grades encounter a framework they already know, which reduces cognitive load and supports the kind of repetition and predictability these learners rely on.
“The research is clear: structured literacy develops the neural pathways that allow students to make progress, even when people have historically assumed they couldn’t,” said Laura Axtell, Education Specialist, Trainer and Presenter, Reading Horizons®. “What this school has done is take that foundation and build something extraordinary on top of it. When you walk into these classrooms, you see what happens when teachers are given a method they believe in, the training to implement it well, and the support to keep adapting it. That is what effective implementation looks like, and for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, it is not just meaningful. It is transformational.”
The national backdrop makes this work especially timely. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just over 30% of fourth graders across the country are reading proficiently. The broader conversation, in Rochester and across the country, has largely centered on reaching students who could learn to read but aren’t. The Holy Childhood has spent three years asking a harder question: how do you teach reading to students who may never speak, whose bodies and brains process the world in ways most classrooms are not built for, and who have never had a consistent literacy program to begin with? The educators here do not have a complete answer. But they are further along than most, and what they are building has implications well beyond Rochester.
About Holy Childhood Holy Childhood offers comprehensive and therapeutic services to a maximum of 120 students, ages 5-22 in the School Program. Students are transported from more than 40 regional school districts from Monroe and the six-county surrounding region. Full-day special education instruction is based on each student’s Individual Education Plan (IEP). Classrooms are 8:1:3 across all grade levels. Instruction includes emphasis on literacy, math, science, social activities of daily living, Work-Based Learning, music, art, adaptive physical education and transition training.
About Reading Horizons For over 40 years, Reading Horizons® has partnered with educators to combat illiteracy through effective, research-based reading instruction. Grounded in Structured Literacy, Reading Horizons provides Pre-K–12 core literacy, supplemental foundational and language literacy, and intervention solutions that help all students become confident readers. Learn more at readinghorizons.com and listen to Literacy Talks, a podcast exploring fresh perspectives on literacy, learning, and teaching.
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