LINCOLN — Nebraska school administrators, get out your No. 2 pencils. The Legislature just gave you two new assignments and a little help in hiring teachers.

On Wednesday, state senators approved Legislative Bill 298, which merged K-12 education proposals, tracking dyslexia, clarifying school dress codes and streamlining hires of teachers from other states.

State Sens. Lou Ann Linehan and Terrell McKinney of Omaha said they were pleased the state would require reports on screening young readers and written dress codes and grooming policies.

Linehan also nodded to the bill’s language from a multi-state compact that could make it easier for Nebraska school districts to hire teachers from other states participating in the compact.

Nebraska, like most other states, has been dealing with a shortage of teachers to replace those retiring or leaving the profession. They’ve passed incentives and changed rules to help.

“We had to do something to help these kids and their teachers,” Linehan said.

LB 298’s requirement that Nebraska’s K-12 schools report how many students they serve with dyslexia is the next step in a multi-year effort by Linehan and others to increase focus on the issue.

In 2018, Linehan worked with then-State Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks on a bill that laid out a new system to help Nebraska schools provide more help to students with dyslexia.

Linehan, who has a child with dyslexia, said she still gets calls from parents who are struggling to help their children read, even after an outside diagnosis.

“I don’t think they’ve done enough to teach the teachers currently in the public schools how to identify it,” Linehan said of school administrators. “This way, we will know.”

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that blunts a child’s ability to read. Schools struggle to diagnose some dyslexic students because they perform well in other subjects, she said.

Education experts testified during the hearing that many dyslexic students struggle to improve without targeted instruction, often in phonics, an older, sound-based approach to reading instruction that fell out of favor in some school districts but is seeing a revival.

Linehan said requiring schools to report the number of students they identified as dyslexic will help the state identify gaps in how it’s being assessed and where help might be needed.

Norah Schmidt, a 16-year-old Lincoln Southeast High School student with dyslexia who testified for Linehan’s bill, hopes requiring schools to share their numbers encourages more screening.

For her, she said, learning to read was “very difficult.” She read a book in fifth grade that a first grader would have read, she said. Hearing that the bill passed Wednesday made her smile.

“I think it will help more kids who need the help get the help they need,” Schmidt said of LB 298. “And it will help the teachers understand who needs the help.”

LB 298 also requires K-12 school boards to adopt written student dress codes and policies for student grooming, part of a proposal McKinney said he aimed at fairness and predictability.

McKinney said some schools and school districts have been inconsistent in applying and interpreting dress codes, which has left some students, often students of color, feeling targeted.

He has said that the hope is to help school administrators and teachers think through prohibitions that might target certain students, including bans on headscarves and durags.

The push for the bill was boosted in spring 2020, when a school secretary cut two Lakota girls’ hair without their parents’ consent. The bill would require the policies to be in place by July 2025.

LB 298 also requires the Nebraska Department of Education to develop and share a model dress code and inclusive grooming policy by December 2024.

“We have to make sure that no matter where the kid is at that they can feel comfortable going to school, and not feel as though some adult is going to negatively affect their day because they don’t like the way they wear their hair or they have tribal regalia,” McKinney said.

This story was originally published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. It is part of the national nonprofit States Newsroom. Find more at nebraskaexaminer.com.