America’s literacy crisis is real, but so are the educators fighting back.
In rural California and small-town Georgia, two literacy leaders are proving that with the right systems, sustained commitment, and a refusal to give up on any child, struggling districts can become success stories.
This year, Ignite Reading unveiled its very first Spark Award to recognize educators who have sparked meaningful change in early literacy.
With this award, we honor two women whose work demonstrates that transformation is possible — even in the most challenging circumstances.
Read about the inaugural Torchbearer Award winner, Dr. Almi Abeyta of Chelsea Public Schools.
Jennie Bachmeyer, M.Ed.
Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services, Red Bluff Union Elementary School District, California
When Spark Awardee Jennie Bachmeyer talks about giving kids what they need to learn to read on time, it’s personal.
Today she’s assistant superintendent of educational services for a rural California school district, but once upon a time, Bachmeyer was a little girl repeating the 1st grade because she wasn’t reading on grade level.
Although she caught up that summer with the help of her parents, eventually skipping 2nd grade, the lifelong educator has never really forgotten that feeling.
“I still have always had that stigma,” she says. “What I’m holding on to was I got held back in 1st grade because I couldn’t read. That’s always stuck in me.”
That feeling sparked a powerful drive in Bachmeyer. It’s a drive that pushed her through the UC Irvine reading specialist program when she felt like she wasn’t doing enough for her students as a 1st grade teacher and one that guides her as a district leader in northern California’s Red Bluff Union Elementary School District.
The Students of Red Bluff
With 1,800 students from TK through 8th grade, Red Bluff serves a largely agricultural community in the Sacramento Valley. Three quarters of the student population qualifies for free or reduced lunch, and students speak more than a dozen languages at home, including Spanish, Cantonese, and Gujarati.
“We are — like everyone else — experiencing a lot of students that have high ACE scores, so they’re dealing with a lot of trauma,” she says. “And because we’re a Title 1 school, you know people are struggling.”
Focus on 1st Grade
One of the criteria for this year’s Spark winners was proven success in creating conditions for all students to become strong readers, says Ignite Reading CEO Jessica Reid Sliwerski. In Red Bluff, that’s meant focusing on 1st grade, which Bachmeyer sees as the key to unlocking the future for her students.
“We can prepare them so well for everything else if we can get them where they need to be by 1st grade,” Bachmeyer says. “They’re going to be so set, and so ready, and so prepared.”
That’s meant making shifts across the district — from partnering with Ignite Reading to provide early intervention to prioritizing staffing to ensure kids get what they need when they need it.
“First grade is just that sweet spot, that pivotal year,” Bachmeyer says. “You can see the kids who are struggling in first grade; they’re going to have struggles. That’s why we have to have our most conscientious, powerful, urgent, on-top-of-it teachers in 1st grade.”
It’s a lot of work, but it’s also incredibly rewarding.
“At 180 days, you get a kid that comes in that knows sounds,” she explains. “They know sounds, and then they leave, and they’re reading full stories, and they’re talking to you about stories, and they’re writing stories. That is miraculous.”
For Bachmeyer, that miracle erases the stigma she’s carried since she was 6years old. One child at a time, she’s making sure no other 1st grader has to repeat her story.
The Ignite Reading Spark Award recognizes educators who have sparked meaningful change in early literacy in their districts through innovation, advocacy, and tireless dedication. Recipients demonstrate:
- Deep expertise in the Science of reading and literacy instruction
- An ability to build and sustain systems that support teacher growth
- Commitment to data-driven decision making
- Success in creating conditions for all students to become strong readers
- Leadership that inspires and empowers others in the literacy work
Monica McDaniel, Ed.D.
Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Meriwether County School System, Georgia
If you ask Monica McDaniel, Ed.D. which superhero she’d most likely be, the Georgia educator’s answer might surprise you.
“I like to be Robin,” McDaniel says.
Yes, she means that Robin — the one who works just as hard as Batman but doesn’t get all the cool toys.
It’s an apt comparison for McDaniel. Since 2021, she’s served as director of curriculum and instruction for Meriwether County School System, a rural Georgia district about an hour southwest of Atlanta.
But McDaniel didn’t end up in district leadership by design.
“I really thought I would live at RESA forever,” she says, referring to her former role as a school improvement specialist at Georgia’s Regional Education Service Agency. “I love working with all the schools. I love the work of school improvement.
But she’d watched Meriwether struggle for years.
“They’d tried something a year, and sometimes it didn’t even last a year,” she explains. “I could not bear with myself if I didn’t at least try to come in and do the work.”
So Robin became Batman.
With an aging population — less than a third of county households include a child under the age of 18 — Meriwether is one of a growing number of counties in the Peach State that’s watched its school enrollment figures decline over the past decade. Today the district serves 2,200 students in pre-K through 12th grades, the majority of whom are eligible for free or reduced lunch.
When McDaniel arrived, multiple schools sat on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools. Her team knew they had to tackle early literacy if they wanted to change the trajectory for their students, and they would have to go all in on getting it right.
When we created the Ignite Reading Spark Award in 2025, the goal was to recognize “educators who have sparked meaningful change in early literacy in their districts through innovation, advocacy, and tireless dedication,” Sliwerski says.
The impacts of meaningful change in Meriwether are impossible to ignore:
- In 2024, the Georgia Department of Education removed all schools within the Meriwether County School System from any school improvement lists for the first time since 2005 when the lists were developed as part of The No Child Left Behind Act.
Read About Meriwether’s Rise From Bottom 5% of Schools to the National Stage
What Unites Them
Bachmeyer and McDaniel come from districts thousands of miles apart, but their approaches share common threads:
- They invest in sustained, job-embedded professional development with coaching support.
- They build systems with multi-year timelines and resist abandoning programs too quickly.
- They use data to drive decisions at every level.
- They address the whole child, understanding that students who are struggling need more than phonics instruction.
- They allow vulnerability, responding to teacher struggles with support rather than judgment.
Most importantly, both refuse to accept that any child can’t learn to read.
As McDaniel puts it: “Reading’s not a natural ability, but it’s a quite capable ability for all students.”
Congratulations to Dr. Monica McDaniel and Jennie Bachmeyer, M.Ed. — our inaugural SPARK Award recipients. Thank you for showing us what’s possible.
