“Students with learning disabilities represent a significant portion of struggling readers. Helping them has been a central issue for Mayor Eric Adams, who has dyslexia himself and was diagnosed late.
“But more than halfway through his term, little has improved for middle and high schoolers with dyslexia, according to lawyers, families and advocates.
“Alejandro, an 11-year-old in Brooklyn who reads at a second-grade level, is one of them.
“His fourth-grade teacher wondered if he was dyslexic. But his school did not offer screening and told his mother to take him to the library more. Alejandro cried in the mornings, begging to stay home from school.
“Now, in seventh grade and finally diagnosed with dyslexia, Alejandro and his lawyer won private tutoring to help him recover. But his school declined to add other support programs to his special education plan, and his mother worries about the damage done.
“‘He’s so shut down from school,’ his mother, Catherine Dipisa, said, adding that Alejandro doesn’t raise his hand in class ‘because he has no idea what’s going on.’
“‘My son is missing out on getting what he deserves, a proper education,’ she said.
“Students with dyslexia have trouble looking at the written word and blending the sounds into language. The city has rolled out universal screening to help identify these children in elementary grades, officials said. But few older students have been assessed.
“Some schools also still use a popular, but discredited reading test that regularly fails to identify poor readers, leaving them unaware of how far behind a student may really be.
“‘Some of my clients struggle to read even sight words, and somehow they’ll have a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level,’ said Calleigh Higgins, who works at the New York Legal Assistance Group.”
Read the full piece by Troy Closson in the New York Times from August 29, 2024.