Your Child Is “At Risk for Reading Difficulties.” Here Is What That Letter Actually Means.

Key Takeaway

• This past year, California began screening students in kindergarten through second grade for early signs of reading difficulty, including dyslexia, during the years when reading gaps are easiest to close.
• Your child took a test called the Reading Difficulties Risk Screener (RDRS), also known as Screening for Risk of Reading Difficulties.
• Your child’s results came to you in a letter, the one calling them “at risk for reading difficulties.”
• Public schools can identify reading risk, but many children need more intensive, individualized structured literacy instruction than a public school setting can realistically provide.

This article will help you understand what the letter means, which questions to ask, and what to do next.

In the 2025 to 2026 school year, California began screening every child in kindergarten through second grade for early signs of reading difficulty, including dyslexia. It is brand new, it reaches about 1.2 million children a year, and most parents had no warning it was coming. Schools call it the Reading Difficulties Risk Screener, and your child’s letter is the result.

There’s no easy way to read a letter like this from your child’s school. “At risk for reading difficulties.” You read those words twice, hoping they would say something different. I am a dyslexia specialist, and I am the mother of five sons, four of them dyslexic, so I know this worry from both sides.

What an “at risk for reading difficulties” letter actually means

Earlier this school year, your child took the reading screening at school. It was designed to catch reading difficulties, including dyslexia, early, when children are at the stage where they are easiest to help, and the results came back flagging your child as at risk. From there, the school has up to 45 days to walk you through what those results mean.

Why early reading intervention matters

If it turns out to be dyslexia, starting early isn’t just being proactive, it’s the path of least resistance. Reading isn’t something the brain is born wired to do. It has to build the connections between sounds and letters from scratch, and a young brain builds them far faster, and with far less effort, than an older one. That’s neuroplasticity, and it’s the reason these early years are the window. As I explain in The Science and Timing of Early Reading Intervention, what might take six months of help at age six can take eighteen months at age ten. That’s the same result for three times the work, just for waiting. And it matters, because without early help, 88% of children who struggle to read in first grade are still struggling in fourth.

Decoding the words on your at-risk letter

Here is what the letter actually means, term by term, in plain language. One note first: districts use different screeners (Amira, mCLASS with DIBELS, Multitudes, or ROAR), so your report may use slightly different words. The terms below are the most common ones, especially on mCLASS, DIBELS, and Amira reports. Each is decoded the same way in our full Reading Screener Glossary.

Every other word on the letter and the results report, including subtests like Nonsense Word Fluency and system terms like MTSS (the school’s tiered support system) and Tier 2 (small-group help beyond the regular lesson), is decoded in the full Reading Screener Glossary.

Is the school teaching your child to read, or working around the problem?

Most schools respond to a struggling reader by working around the problem, with audiobooks, extra time, or someone reading the test aloud. That gets your child through the day, but it doesn’t make them a better reader. What does is structured literacy: direct, explicit teaching of how sounds and letters build into words. It’s the thing that actually fixes reading, and it’s the thing a stretched school rarely delivers at the intensity a struggling reader needs. So here is the question to keep asking: is your child being taught to read, or just helped to cope?

Why a flag rarely turns into a fix in the public school system

There is a right way and a wrong way to judge the help your child gets at school. The wrong way is to ask whether they made a little progress, because almost every child inches forward. The right way is to ask whether they caught up to the children who are reading where they should be. That is the only finish line that counts, and it is the one schools rarely reach.

I have watched this pattern for twenty-two years. A child gets flagged, the school adds some small-group reading time, the scores tick up a few points, and everyone calls it progress. But the distance between that child and the rest of the class does not close. It usually grows. In a separate study that followed more than 400 struggling readers from first grade all the way through high school, the gap almost never closed, and the researchers concluded the help those children got at school simply was not enough to bring them back in line with their peers.

This is not the teachers failing your child. The system is stretched: too many struggling readers, too few hours, so the help gets spread thin across a full classroom instead of aimed at the exact skills your child is missing. The U.S. Department of Education’s research arm studied this precise model, screen the child and layer on reading support, and found the flagged first graders ended up reading no better, and slightly worse, than children who got no extra help at all.

California’s first year shows the same strain, with up to 60% of kindergartners flagged at once, far more than any school can serve one-on-one. So watch the next benchmark, the checkpoint a few months out. If your child’s score has not moved by then, the support is not working, and that is your signal to act rather than wait for the following screening.

Why waiting to act on a reading gap costs more over time

The cost of waiting does not stay flat, it compounds. A child who is behind reads less, so the gap widens every year instead of holding still, and the same help takes longer the longer you wait. Once reading shifts from learning to read to reading to learn around third grade, that gap stops being a reading problem and starts dragging down every other subject. You do not have to wait on a system that may not close it. Structured literacy tutoring is what actually teaches an at-risk child to read, and started early, it can change where your child’s reading is headed. Starting now puts the next move back in your hands.

Your options from here

As a parent who just received this letter, you have three real options.

1. Wait and see. You can wait to find out whether your child is one of the few who catch up on whatever support the school provides. As the research above shows, very few do.
2. Get supplemental help. One-on-one structured literacy tutoring is proven to close the gap. For most families, the decision comes down to a single realization: the support the school provides may never be enough, and waiting to find out costs time your child cannot get back. That is what moves most parents to enroll in a supplementary structured literacy program sooner rather than later.
3. Get answers first. If you are the kind of parent who does not want to wait, and wants to understand exactly what is going on and which path is right for your child, a dyslexia assessment gives you that clarity and tells you exactly where to start.

How to leverage a dyslexia assessment for your child

A dyslexia assessment tells you whether this is actually dyslexia or something else, and it gives you leverage. The at-risk letter alone won’t qualify your child for a 504 plan or an IEP, but by law the district has to consider an outside assessment you bring them, as long as it’s thorough and credible. That’s why I do every assessment at READ Learning Center myself.

If you’re not sure where to start, give us a call and tell us about your child’s unique situation. We can help you work through the options and figure out the best path forward, even if that points you somewhere other than us.

Questions parents ask us about the at-risk letter

Plain answers to what families want to know.

Chapters

• 0:06 —  What the “at risk” letter actually means
• 2:14 —  Decoding the words: benchmark, composite, and the rest
• 4:24 —  Why acting early matters so much
• 5:29 —  What the school can and cannot do
• 7:05 —  Your three options and what to ask the school
• 8:45 —  Early news, not bad news

Chapters

• 0:00 —  What the screening is and why it happened
• 1:04 —  What the results actually mean
• 2:13 —  Why early intervention matters
• 3:17 —  What schools can and cannot do
• 4:21 —  Your options and next steps