Every kid deserves to learn to read.
At City of Promise we are family focused and data driven. Over the past 3 years we have worked hard, along with our nonprofit partners, the schools, and our kids and families, to build a system that addresses pressing academic needs in Charlottesville. This dashboard provides a transparent look into the data that we are collecting and the progress that our kids and families are making. Our intent is to have an honest and thorough appraisal of what’s working and where future areas of opportunity exist.
This dashboard is live and iterative. We will update data at regular intervals as we receive it from the schools and our community partners.
Where this data comes from
All evaluative data is derived from the Virginia Language and Literacy Screening System (VALLSS) literacy screener, administered to the 25 K–3 students (evaluative assessment criteria measures changes for our 4th graders) in City of Promise’s Community Schools cohort at Trailblazer Elementary by our core partner, Virginia Literacy Partnerships (VLP). VLP has worked diligently to build out and execute a comprehensive afterschool tutoring program 4x/weekly for Trailblazer students.
VALLSS is used to identify relative strengths and weaknesses in specific literacy skill areas, including both code-based and language comprehension skills. Each student is scheduled to be screened in fall, mid-year, and spring, producing a raw score, a risk band, and subskill detail. Some students are not screened for a variety of reasons and therefore their scores for that assessment period are unable to be represented in our dataset. This dashboard displays literacy assessment data over time to show how the cohort is reading across the year. We intend to correlate this data to other environmental factors to help identify drivers of positive change and future areas of opportunity.
19 K–3 students in our cohort participated in the afterschool tutoring program across the two school years. We have complete and longitudinal VALLSS data for 18 of them, based on the testing schedule and parameters of VLP and the school. We do not yet have school-based, spring literacy data for the students, and will update this dashboard as that data is released.
The data can be manipulated by grade, school year, and cohort size, isolating for students who are participating in a full suite of City of Promise initiatives or those who are only accessing tutoring services, coordinated by City of Promise in partnership with VLP.
This dashboard relies on school-based assessment data and data derived from VLP screenings to show longitudinal literacy growth for our students.
All student identities in this data dashboard have been deidentified. The data represented is real; however, the identities of the students have been altered.
Raw Scores over time
Each bar represents a testing period — Fall, Mid-Year, and Spring scores side-by-side. Students are sorted from left to right by total fall to spring gain (biggest movers on the left). Hover over each student to see a breakdown of their scores.
How far each student is from escaping High Risk
All of our students are in the “high risk” band. The high risk band indicates a student is significantly behind in foundational literacy development and requires targeted, explicit instruction. The highest risk kids are the ones who are the furthest from escaping the “high risk” band. This comes with in- and out-of-school intervention to support score growth. Because the cutoff for each risk band rises across the year and from grade to grade, a student can be improving their literacy but still not keep pace with the climbing bar. The black line at 0 is the escape line — above it, the student has moved into the moderate or low risk bands. Below it, they're still in high risk.
What happens to reading over the summer
For students with a spring baseline, this compares their VALLSS score in Spring ’25 to Fall ’25. A line that falls means the student’s raw score dropped over the summer break — the “summer slide.” The drops cluster in the youngest readers (K–1 entering 1–2), the grades where skills are newest and most fragile without practice.
9 of 15 students lost ground over the summer — an average of -22 points among them.
Across all 15 students, the average change was -10.7 points over the summer.
A deep dive into a year's work
VALLSS measures decoding, encoding, and language comprehension by evaluating a variety of skills like phoneme segmentation, oral reading fluency, and identification of letter sounds. Click on a student to get a detailed view of their progress during school year 2025–2026.
| Name | Grade | Fall | Mid | Spring | Gain | Fall gap | Spring gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amara Booker | K | 551 | 626 | 650 | +99 | -32 | -32 |
| Saniyah Gaines | K | 501 | 594 | 632 | +131 | 18 | -14 |
| Amari Freeman | 1 | 572 | 613 | 629 | +57 | 32 | 22 |
| Imani Dupree | 1 | 551 | 577 | 614 | +63 | 53 | 37 |
| Ja'kai Pinckney | 1 | 614 | 637 | 654 | +40 | -10 | -3 |
| Ja'marion Goode | 1 | 575 | 622 | 637 | +62 | 29 | 14 |
| Jamari Dawson | 1 | 593 | 637 | 637 | +44 | 11 | 14 |
| Lamont Easley | 1 | 553 | 595 | 613 | +60 | 51 | 38 |
| Nyla Caldwell | 1 | 571 | 619 | 636 | +65 | 33 | 15 |
| Royal Brooks | 1 | 550 | 635 | 638 | +88 | 54 | 13 |
| Yalda Noori | 1 | 568 | 620 | 636 | +68 | 36 | 15 |
| Za'riah Tinsley | 1 | 599 | 637 | 648 | +49 | 5 | 3 |
| Bilal Ahmadi | 2 | 624 | 658 | 674 | +50 | 23 | -7 |
| DeShawn Mayfield | 2 | 594 | 652 | 651 | +57 | 53 | 16 |
| Khalil Sumter | 2 | 594 | 610 | 616 | +22 | 53 | 51 |
| Mariam Haidari | 2 | 615 | 614 | 630 | +15 | 32 | 37 |
| Nathan Pierce | 2 | 646 | 666 | 678 | +32 | 1 | -11 |
| Zuri Pryor | 2 | 622 | 647 | 648 | +26 | 25 | 19 |
| Jaylen Mayfield | 3 | 609 | 625 | 636 | +27 | 57 | 42 |
| Kiara Hampton | 3 | 675 | — | — | — | -9 | — |
| Marquis Toliver | 3 | 636 | 662 | 674 | +38 | 30 | 4 |
| Talia Brent | 3 | 653 | 663 | 669 | +16 | 13 | 9 |