This paper describes the rationale and procedures used in identifying and retraining illiterate or semiliterate high school students in an alternative high school. The program focused on decoding skills taught through SRA materials in a reading skills laboratory. Because many of the students had had many years of unsuccessful remedial reading instruction, the program attempted to retrain them, as though they had never previously tried to learn to read. After one year, 39 of the 59 students who attended the course had completed the decoding phase and were able to read all of the spelling patterns covered by the SRA series. All but one of the students advanced at least two levels in the SRA series and were evaluated by teachers as having considerably improved their decoding skills. (AA)