It’s supposed to be clockwork by now: Ohio’s youngest students start off the school year with an early literacy assessment, K-3 reading diagnostic results come back, and the district starts building Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plans (RIMPs) for every child who’s reading below grade level.
Fast forward 60 days, and the RIMPs should be built, letters dispatched to notify students’ families, and intervention should be under way.
Notice those two words: should be? Thanks to new Ohio literacy legislation, building RIMPs for students struggling with reading is about to get even more complicated.
Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plan updates for school year 2026-27
No more early literacy diagnostic exemptions
The state has ended the practice of allowing exemptions for students with disabilities in K-3. If your district previously carved anyone out of screening, that’s no longer an option. This could mean a few more names on your RIMP list this fall than in years past, not because more kids are struggling, but because every child who has difficulties with reading is now actually being counted.
This “no exemptions” rule is specifically about the K-3 reading diagnostic, but Ohio’s broader K-12 intervention requirements still exclude students with significant cognitive disabilities or TBI-related IEP services, unless a parent and the school agree services would help.
The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has a list of allowable accommodations to support students with disabilities when administering one of the state-approved assessments.
New scoring for RIMP eligibility
The on-track and not-on-track scores that have determined a student’s RIMP eligibility for the past few years are still here, and they’ll still determine whether your students require a RIMP. However ODE has added a new “limited” score as well for students who are falling behind. This belongs to a broader, K-12 academic intervention requirement running alongside RIMPs, catching students on a different, wider scale.
Updated RIMP reporting Ohio’s EMIS data system
Districts will now be required to report annually on the number of students eligible for academic intervention services and the number of students who receive them.
To align with that new requirement, there are now RIMP intervention codes for reporting on reading intervention for students across grade levels in EMIS, not just early elementary. If your district’s documentation practices have treated RIMP reporting as an early elementary task, you should confirm that practice actually extends to every grade a RIMP might follow a student into.
New RIMP resources for grades 4 and up
Ohio has published a RIMP tip sheet built specifically for older students, a step-by-step guide for building RIMPs in grades 4 and up, and a short video series walking through specific interventions. Districts whose RIMP expertise has mostly centered on the K-3 diagnostic moment have a new, more specific resource to draw from for older-grade plans.
Changes to Kindergarten reading assessments
Although Ohio districts are still required to administer the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA) at the start of the year, the KRA no longer satisfies the state’s reading diagnostic requirements. Districts that have been using it to identify which students need a RIMP need to switch to a different, approved diagnostic.
Also new this school year is a schedule change for kindergarten assessment. Kindergarten used to have its own window, the first 20 days of instruction, for the reading diagnostic. That’s gone now.
Every K-3 student’s reading diagnostic now has to be administered on or before September 30, with no separate timeline by grade.
Changes to Ohio RIMPs still to come
State RIMP compliance reviews begin in 2027-28
Starting with the 2027-2028 school year, the state will begin selecting individual schools each year for an on-site review of their intervention services, including document review, staff interviews, and observation of interventions in progress.
Now’s the time to make sure you’re district’s RIMP documentation, from diagnostic results through intervention records, would hold up if selected.
Content updated:
