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.

A well-planned and implemented Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) will ensure that goals, resources, and practices are aligned and cohesive, ensuring positive student outcomes. Data turns MTSS from a framework into a force. When goals, resources, and practices line up with what your data is telling you, students grow. This session digs into how to use data at every layer of MTSS: universal screening, progress monitoring, tiered decisions, and where you put your time and money. MTSS is way more than tiered instruction. It runs on intentional planning, regular data review, and deliberate choices that keep student outcomes at the center of every call. Growth takes work. Big growth happens when the system is strong, and the system gets strong when data leads.

This session examines South Carolina's statewide LETRS implementation through a comprehensive literacy leadership lens. Through a policy overview and spotlights from districts at different stages of the LETRS journey, presenters share real data, honest reflections on challenges, and practical tools that illustrate what it takes to align leadership, assessment, professional development, instruction, intervention, and family engagement into a sustainable literacy system. Attendees leave with a structured reflection tool to assess their own district's strengths and next steps.

By the time students reach the upper elementary and secondary levels, an assumption is made that all students are automatic and accurate with decoding. But what happens when the foundational floor drops out? For many students, reading difficulties that were once hidden emerge. This session tackles the phenomenon of Late-Emerging Reading Difficulties. We will move beyond the myth that literacy intervention is "too late" for older students and instead focus on the evidence-backed instructional shifts required to accelerate growth. We'll examine how to diagnose the root cause of comprehension issues, explore the type of instruction that will accelerate student mastery of these foundational skills, and discuss the systems level decisions that are needed to drive instructional practice and ensure student success.

"First and foremost, always and forever — find the vowels." It sounds simple, but it is one of the most powerful instructional mantras a literacy teacher can carry into the classroom. The vast majority of English words follow predictable phonics patterns — and the six syllable types are the key to unlocking them. Every syllable type, every decoding decision, every spelling pattern comes back to the vowel. When students know where to look and what to expect, they gain a transferable strategy for reading and spelling words they have never seen before. Yet syllable type instruction is one of the most underutilized tools in the literacy classroom, often taught in isolation, rushed through, or skipped altogether in favor of whole-word memorization. Rooted in the foundational content of LETRS Unit 4: Advanced Decoding, Spelling, and Word Recognition, this session brings the six syllable types to life through explicit instruction, lively discussion, and meaningful hands-on practice. Participants will build their own deep understanding of each type — closed, open, vowel-consonant-e, vowel team, r-controlled, and consonant-le — always coming back to the vowel as the anchor. They will leave with ready-to-use classroom strategies they can implement the very next day. Whether you are currently working through LETRS, applying it in classrooms, or coaching others to do so, this session will change the way you look at every word on the page.

Preparing students for SC READY requires more than content knowledge. It requires strong literacy skills across all subject areas. This interactive session showcases our “Race to SC READY” approach that integrated literacy routines into science instruction to build student readiness. Participants will experience engaging strategies used in the classroom, including reading, writing, and student engagement and discourse routines embedded in science lessons. Attendees will leave with practical, ready-to-use tools and a clear understanding of how to intentionally prepare students for future success.