Cursive handwriting instruction starts in our elementary classrooms this school year, required by a state law signed in January. The district wrote the curriculum over the summer and bought the materials.[1]

It did not arrive at the Board of Education on Aug. 17 as a standalone item. Assistant Superintendent Robert Famularo laid out the plan inside a curriculum report whose other headline was a district focus, new this year, on whether classroom technology is the right tool — and he tied the two together himself.[2]

How Wyckoff will teach it

The model Famularo described is simple. On day one, the teacher gives a 10-minute mini-lesson introducing the strokes.[3] On days two through five, students practice independently.[4] The district purchased materials from the handwriting publisher Zaner-Bloser to serve as its main resource in the area.[5]

The grades that miss it

When Famularo finished his report, board member Frank Barbagallo put a question to him: how many grades had missed out — weren't the current sixth, seventh and eighth graders among them?[6] Famularo said he did not have an exact answer. Cursive has had no state standard, he said, "and it hasn't been for a while," and he offered to go back and check what the standards had been.[7]

Barbagallo floated an elective, or a club, at Eisenhower Middle School for students who wanted to go back and pick it up.[8] Another board member asked whether it was too late to add an elective this year. The schedule is already set for 2026-27, came the answer from the dais; a club was raised as the alternative.[9] Nothing was voted on, and nothing was committed to.

Famularo said the district's first meeting with teachers about cursive "was pretty positive in terms of possibilities and how we integrated into the curriculum."[10]

The screen-time connection

Famularo introduced cursive inside a broader set of "areas of focus" he has been building this summer with Superintendent Dr. Postma, district administrators and the instructional coaches. One of them is what he called "balanced technology."[11]

His framing of that shift was generational. "Fifteen years ago when administrators went into classrooms and observed teachers, we were looking for feedback in terms of how could ... technology be better used in these schools," he said. "It's almost the opposite. Now we're looking at classrooms where we're kind of asking ourselves, is technology the right tool?" The answer, he added, might still be yes — but that is the question being asked.[12]

He said the district had spent time this summer rereading "the surveys that were done in the spring."[13] That is the same technology survey the administration brought back to the board on June 29, in which roughly two-thirds of 475 parent respondents said school-day screen time was too high.[14] The closest look, Famularo said, will be at kindergarten through second grade — a younger band than the grades the cursive mandate covers.[13]

That is where handwriting came in. Cursive, he said, "kind of goes hand in hand with that. We want to make sure we have that foundation in tactile motor and social development as well."[2] He told the board he expects to gather staff input on technology use once school is back in session, and to report progress back to the board after that.[13]

The next night, Committeeman Jim Schappert carried both threads across town to the Township Committee. The board had "spent a lot of time in the meeting talking about the technology balance," he reported — and on the good-news side, "cursive writing is now part of the curriculum in our town starting this year."[15]

What the law actually requires

Gov. Phil Murphy signed the cursive bill on Jan. 19, 2026. It became P.L. 2025, c. 284, and it is two sentences long. The operative section reads, in full: "A school district shall incorporate instruction on cursive handwriting into the curriculum for students in grades three through five. The curriculum shall include activities and instructional materials that help students become proficient in reading cursive and legibly writing in cursive by the end of grade five." The act "shall first apply to the first full school year next following the date of enactment"[16] — 2026-27, as the state later spelled out for districts.[17]

Famularo's summary to the board — "there's no standard, just a mandate that has to be taught," with a focus on integration across all subject areas[18] — holds up against the state's own implementation guidance. In a Feb. 11 broadcast to districts, the Department of Education listed exactly two requirements: instruction in grades three through five, and curriculum that includes activities and materials getting students to proficiency by the end of fifth grade.[17]

Everything else in that document is framed as a consideration rather than a rule. Districts should build on skills already in the standards, keep the cursive style consistent across grade levels, and "consider developing assessment(s)" to measure proficiency.[17] The guidance sets no minimum number of minutes per week, supplies no state curriculum, and requires no test.

Why it went away, and whether it works

New Jersey's current English language arts standards, adopted in 2023, already require print handwriting in the early grades — matching upper- and lowercase letters by the end of kindergarten, writing both alphabets from memory in first grade, and writing legibly and fluently enough to support composition by the end of second grade. What they do not mention is cursive.[17] The new law adds it on top of that foundation, which is why the state's guidance tells districts that grades three through five should build on what students already do in print.[17]

New Jersey is not early to this. NEA Today reported in March 2026 that 27 states have laws "mandating or encouraging" cursive instruction in public schools, up from 14 a decade ago.[19]

Whether it helps is less settled than the mandates suggest. Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo, a clinical professor of literacy studies at Drexel University, wrote this month that the research includes a 2019 study in which 141 first graders taught cursive read better by the end of the year, a 2020 Norwegian brain-imaging study finding that cursive writing activates neural pathways used for learning and memory, and evidence of benefits for students with dyslexia and dysgraphia. She also wrote that the science is shakier than cursive's champions let on: the strong finding is that handwriting beats typing for learning, and whether cursive specifically has an edge over ordinary print is unclear. Doing it properly, she estimated, takes about 70 minutes a week.[20] A 2023 Canadian study cited by NEA Today concluded it is "unlikely that cursive offers more cognitive benefits than printing, or vice versa."[19]

Wyckoff's third, fourth and fifth graders start finding out in the next few weeks.