“I’m teaching 6th grade Sunday School this year, and I learned this week that I’m not going to be able to just go around the room and have the students take turns reading a paragraph, because two out of the six I called on last time couldn’t read.”
So do the kids a favor and teach reading and help them learn how to read properly. The kids will thank you afterwards. *sigh*.
Good luck with it. I get college level students who struggle with reading and then wonder why they are failing all their classes. Bright students, but you have to spend time teaching greek and latin so that the kids can understand scientific terminology. Me, I was an autodidact and picked up on most of it myself, but nobody teaches suffixes and affixes today. Back in the day they taught them in grade 4!
I wish I had time to teach them to read properly, but I’ve got less than an hour a week to get through the whole Old Testament! It’s going to a disaster when those kids get to high school, and the school will probably (if they haven’t already) label them “disabled,” rather than acknowledge that the system failed to teach perfectly normal children to read.