The Palmetto Education Summit 2026

Every child deserves daily access to meaningful, grade‑level learning. Yet educators face a pressing challenge: how do we support students who have fallen behind—including those receiving Special Education services—while still working to close persistent achievement gaps? This session offers a clear framework, practical strategies, and essential mindset shifts to move away from defaulting to remediation when striving to support struggling learners. You'll discover how acceleration opens the door to rich Tier 1 instruction for all students—fueling confidence, momentum, inspiration, and genuine academic growth. Come ready to rethink, re‑ignite, and reimagine what students can achieve when we raise the bar and provide the path to reach it.

Do you want to ensure all your students achieve grade-level expectations?  Are you looking for instructional practices that are proven to lead to high levels of achievement?  Join us to learn how to utilize essential components of explicit instruction throughout your entire instructional day.

Educators, families, and community members must all work together to improve the literacy skills of our youth in South Carolina. Join us for this interactive session as members of the Academic Alliance of South Carolina share three evidence-based practices that teachers, tutors, mentors, and parents can use across all content areas and at any grade level to improve the literacy skills of students with dyslexia and those with persistent reading difficulties.  Participants will learn instructional strategies for reading aloud to youth at all grade and content levels to improve vocabulary, comprehension, and language skills regardless of the reading level,  gain insight into using repeated reading as a strategy to improve reading fluency and comprehension as one of the key critical components in the science of reading, and acquire the skills to implement a cognitive strategy called, Get the Gist, to enable youth to identify the main idea at the sentence, paragraph, or complete text level, which are key skills for summarizing information efficiently. Participants will receive practical tips for implementing these strategies, along with electronic resources to support their use.