About 70 percent of the freshman class at Aims Community College this year needs remedial classes — and many of those are in reading 030 classes.

“That is a lot,” said Marsi Liddell, Aims president. “And when I say ‘reading 030,’ I mean they are reading at a third-grade level. Those students cannot make up that much, from third- to 13th-grade, in one year. And these are not just Greeley school kids. These are students from all across Colorado.”

Liddell’s statements were not new to Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia. Garcia has traveled 2,000 miles across the state listening to community members and educators talk about what needs to be done to improve the literacy problems in the state.

Garcia was in Greeley on Tuesday at two separate town hall-type meetings. They were the last of 34 meetings before his office puts together a recommendation for the Colorado Department of Education about what people believe needs to be done to improve literacy throughout the state.

“We know there are students who need a significant amount of remediation,” Garcia told several dozen people at both the University of Northern Colorado and Dos Rios Elementary School. “But that is a cost to the state and a cost to the individual in time and money as we tell them, ‘I know you want a degree, but you’re not ready to start down that path yet.’ Those students are less likely to graduate and less likely to enroll. If they are going to arrive at college ready to learn, we need to make sure all kids arrive at kindergarten ready to learn.”

Liddell along with Kay Norton, UNC president, and Ranelle Lang, District 6 superintendent, talked about some of the things their institutions are doing together to try to improve the education of K-12 students. And community members shared ideas about what the business community can do to help.

Most of the conversation, however, was directed at early literacy skills and how important it is to start young, especially with lower-income children.

“If we’re concerned about our third-grade reading scores, it’s not a third-grade issue,” Garcia said. “It’s a second-grade issue; it’s a first-grade issue; it’s a kindergarten issue; it’s a preschool issue; it’s a nutrition issue; it’s a health care issue; it’s a family support issue.”

Lang said part of the problem in District 6 is that lack of funding allows only 52 percent of the kindergartners in the district to get all-day kindergarten. Also, the district gets 481 Colorado Preschool Program slots a year from the state but has 2,000 children that qualify.

The Colorado Preschool Program is a state-funded program that targets children at risk for starting grade school unprepared. Many of those kids come from non-English-speaking homes.

“We can’t worry about early literacy if we don’t think about adult literacy and family literacy,” Garcia said. “Some parents are better equipped than others. We know we can work with parents to better help them.”

Cindy Welsh, with the High Plains Library District, said the one thing she hears over and over again is the need for more GED programs and more GED programs in Spanish.

“When these adults have their GEDs, then we’re going to break that cycle of low learners,” Welsh said.

Greeley Mayor Tom Norton said city government also must do what it can to help, such as taking over district after-school and athletic programs.

“We have the responsibility to do what we can to make Greeley better 20, 30, 50 years from now,” Tom Norton said. “If we do that, then they can concentrate on the academics that they are graded on.”

Garcia said these meetings are designed to find an answer.

“I want to know what we can do to help,” Garcia said. “There are ideas we think will help Colorado children have success. Things like before- and after-school programs. Things like preschool. Things like all-day kindergarten. The challenge is a lot of these things are costly. We need to know what do Coloradoans want from their system? And what will they support?”