October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. Right now there are families all over Washington who bleed money to help their children with dyslexia succeed. Unfortunately, not every family can afford to do so.
When it comes to dyslexia, early intervention works, but good luck getting your dyslexic child help from our underfunded public school system.
The Office of Superintendent of Public Education has excellent information available online about how to identify and treat dyslexia, but every parent I know whose child has dyslexia has encountered what critics call the “wait to fail” model. This means that unless your student is two grade levels behind in reading, there is not much that a Washington State school district can do beyond offering accommodations.
It’s not fair for my little girl, with her long blonde hair and sweet disposition, to be the poster child for anything, but I asked her if it would be okay if I wrote a column about how she is such a good reader.
“Of course, Mom,” she said, and then she stuck her nose back in her chapter book.
My daughter exhibited red flags for dyslexia starting at 4 years old. In first grade, my husband and I paid for her to be privately assessed. She immediately began two hours a week of private tutoring from a certified teacher named Margaret Kulkin from Northwest K-8 Learning Support.
I also used my teaching background to coach her further, and we bought an iPad and subscription to the charity Learning Ally, which provides access to over 80,000 audiobooks. It has taken thousands of dollars, a team of professionals and hundreds of hours of hard work on my daughter’s part for her to read at grade level.
The reason the “wait to fail” model does a disservice to children with dyslexia is because the range of what is normal in kindergarten, first and second grade is so broad that a lot of early indicators of dyslexia get overlooked.
Red flags for dyslexia and dysgraphia include: a profusion of letter and number reversals, difficulty learning sight words such as “the,” “or,” “there” and “was,” sounding out the same word over and over, skipping words, saying the wrong word, difficulty with sustained reading, unconventional spelling, lower case and uppercase letters being the same size, words smooshing together, a total lack of margins while writing and more. For a full list visit www. Dyslexia.Yale.Edu.
Another huge red flag is a performance level that doesn’t match the student’s intelligence and effort. A lot of children with dyslexia are told to “Try harder!” or “Just concentrate more and you’ll get it.”
By the time they are in third or fourth grade and are clearly two grade levels behind, their self-esteem is shot.
The International Dyslexia Association says that “as many as 15 to 20 percent of the population as a whole have some of the symptoms of dyslexia.” Line up five kids, and it’s likely that one of them needs help.
Come on, Washington, waiting for those children to fail is wrong.
Jennifer Bardsley is an Edmonds mom of two, and author of the book “Genesis Girl.” Find her online on Instagram @the_ya_gal, Twitter @jennbardsley or at teachingmybabytoread.com.
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