My name is Sally Elliott and I am a middle school reading teacher in Stokes Co. I love to read and reading has always come quite naturally to me. My mom tells me that when I was five I was reading the Charlotte Observer. I have passed this trait on to my own daughter who is also a voracious reader. When I came through my elementary education undergraduate program at UNC Greensboro, it was during the whole language era and that’s how I learned to teach reading and language arts. It took a few years, but I finally began to realize that kids were coming into middle school without the necessary skills to actually decode; much less read for comprehension. That’s when I really became interested in the mechanics of reading. Not long after, I was given the opportunity to teach the READ180 program at my school. I have been in this position for three years and I love it. It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that I needed to know a lot more about how to teach reading if I was going to be able to help these students. This is why I enrolled in the reading master’s program. I know that I am the last hope some of these students might have. High school is all about content and there is no reading teacher there to support them. I never want to think that a student drops out of school simply because they never learned to read proficiently.