The more people we speak to about dyslexia, the more people we meet who are affected by it.
We learned about dyslexia as part of our respective roles in the education community; one of us as a teacher and principal, the other as a CEC representative and special education advocate. Since so many parents of children with dyslexia are quite vocal – and that is a good thing – you cannot be immersed in education and NOT be aware of it.
So in 2014, we met with parents and advocates at Borough Hall to learn more about this reading disability and its effects on students and parents alike. The lack of services and programs directed to this population of students caused an outcry from parents that could not be ignored. We wanted, we needed, to know more.
We quickly learned that Staten Island has very few, if any, resources to help students with dyslexia or other language-based learning disabilities, and discovered, to our surprise, that so many children are being bused to schools in New Jersey, Manhattan and Brooklyn to get the services they require to succeed. But in order to attend these schools, children need to undergo expensive neuro-psychological testing to diagnose dyslexia, typically costing $3,000 - $5,000. After that, parents must hire an advocate or a lawyer to go to an impartial hearing with the NYC Department of Education (“DOE”) to present their case to have their child placed in an appropriate school.
If successful there, and many are, the tuition for these schools is typically $50,000 per year. However, since every child under federal law is entitled to a “Free and Appropriate Public Education” (“FAPE”), the DOE is obligated to pay the tuition and transportation for all NYC students who attend these schools.
In the meantime, both diagnosed and undiagnosed children continue to attend public schools on Staten Island, where they struggle and continue to fall behind in reading, and where they simply cannot get the help they need. In some cases, students are given vouchers to get help outside of the school system, but there are very few providers who are trained in the services they need - which are teachers steeped in a specialized instructional approach such as Orton-Gillingham, a method which employs multisensory strategies.
Children are born with dyslexia and cannot outgrow it, although they can learn strategies to cope with it and be highly successful. Dyslexia is certainly not linked to low intelligence – in fact, it appears that most dyslexics have average to above average intelligence and are highly creative; we have an obligation to ensure that children are being taught in ways which allow them to learn. The education community, with an ever-increasing emphasis on reading and literacy, can no longer ignore dyslexia and we have no alternative but to address it in our schools.
It takes time and training - a great deal of both - but we need to make this critical investment in our children right now.