Describing the SouthEastern Regional Vision for Education (SERVE) program and its mission to promote and support the continual improvement of educational opportunities for all learners in the Southeast, this paper discusses ways that teachers can decipher their students' progress in reading to help further develop students' reading skills. It is based on site visits to 18 schools endorsed as having strong reading programs. After a brief overview, it summarizes 10 needs and strategies for improving reading and then presents these needs, strategies, and results in more detail. The paper concludes that the 10 strategies described need to be considered in the context of the "big picture" (the way the faculty approaches its work); and that the schools visited are not doing any one thing exclusively. Contains 31 references. Four appendixes contain a questionnaire, a list of schools considered in the study, 8 points on how children learn to read, and a 95-item bibliography. (SC)