When Martin County School District realized its existing reading intervention wasn’t meeting the needs of striving readers, especially those receiving Tier 3 support, it turned to SPIRE—a structured literacy program based on Orton-Gillingham principles and grounded in the science of reading.
Implemented across 13 elementary schools, SPIRE provided educators with the tools and scaffolding needed to deliver effective, targeted reading instruction. EPS and LXD Research partnered to craft this case study evaluating SPIRE’s impact on student literacy achievement from Fall 2022 to Spring 2023. The results? A statistically significant relationship between SPIRE lesson completion and improved Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST) scores, confirming that more time in SPIRE translated to measurable growth for students who needed it most.
