Baltimore County expands cursive instruction to all 2nd, 3rd grade classrooms

Racquel Bazos, Baltimore Sun on May 27, 2026

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BALTIMORE — Baltimore County Public Schools will bring cursive writing back to all second- and third-grade classrooms next school year following a pilot program launched this fall, Superintendent Myriam Rogers announced Wednesday.

Rogers said the rollout will not require new spending because the cursive materials are already included in the elementary English Language Arts curriculum from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Into Reading program.

As a result, the move is “budget neutral,” Rogers said, as the existing program already has the components teachers need to add in cursive. No additional materials were needed to run the pilot program this year either, she said.

Rogers cited benefits of cursive like fine motor skill development, greater literacy and writing skills and the ability to read historical documents.

“When students can write more automatically, they can focus more attention on generating ideas, organizing thoughts and communicating clearly,” Rogers said.

This is something that residents have been in full support of. A September 2025 reader poll conducted by The Baltimore Sun found that 91% of readers believed elementary students should learn cursive in Baltimore County Public Schools.

How does it help?

The idea is that learning cursive forces elementary students to both pay attention to written language and increase their speed when writing. District officials have also said children with dyslexia or dysgraphia might particularly benefit from the multisensory teaching of how to make the cursive marks, creating more muscle memory.

That’s backed up by a recent Indiana University study. The project, led by Karin James, found that handwriting — specifically fluid, connected strokes like drawing and cursive — activates the reading and writing circuits in the brain much more effectively than typing on a keyboard or simply printing. Another study at the University of Washington found that teaching cursive can “provide critical cognitive support for struggling writers and helps maximize the brain’s language processing centers.”

Parents can access an optional cursive writing packet for their students to practice over the summer on the district’s Parent University website.

Twenty-four elementary schools were in the cursive writing pilot that started in November and “provid(ed) meaningful input that helped to shape our next steps,” Rogers said. The pilot included second through fourth grade classes.

Though cursive was never fully out of the district’s curriculum, Jennifer Craft, executive director for Literacy and Humanities at BCPS said in August, “it hasn’t been emphasized.”

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