Parents demand help for dyslexic kids
Some Hilliard families say their school district hasn’t been doing enough to identify and help children who struggle with reading disabilities, as federal law requires.
Hilliard City Schools administrators, however, say the district already can put a check mark next to virtually every item on the parents’ wish list. Since fall 2015, they say, it has reached out to literacy experts and to other districts that have improved their screening for dyslexia in kindergartners. It also is training more teachers in a phonics-based
curriculum that employs multiple senses, which has been shown to help dyslexics compensate for their word decoding problem.
It might be a case of district officials not explaining themselves well enough, said Vicky Clark, Hilliard’s director of elementary curriculum, so they’re working on that, too.
“I want them to know that they’re being heard,” Clark said.
The parents, calling themselves Hilliard Parents United, started a closed Facebook group, which has 35 members. They plan to show up to Monday’s school board meeting to introduce themselves and state their goals. They have compiled 73 people’s stories to share with board members.
Dyslexia is a neurological disorder in which the brain has trouble figuring out written words. That manifests differently in different people. A May 2003 article in the journal “Pediatrics in Review” estimated that dyslexia affects somewhere between 5 percent and 17 percent of the population. Without proper intervention, these students are more likely to be held back in school, get suspended and drop out, says the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
Scott Peachey of Hilliard has been watching his second-grade daughter struggle with reading since kindergarten.
“I’m constantly met (in the school) with the ‘let’s wait and see.’ Well, let’s not wait and see, because we’re actually really impacting her learning at this point,” Peachey said. “Earlier this year, my daughter came home completely in tears because she just doesn’t want to read. She hates reading. I don’t want her to feel like that.”
The Peacheys suspected dyslexia because their two older children have been diagnosed with it. They hired a tutor this fall who uses the preferred OrtonGillingham method, and he said his daughter has made substantial improvement. He also hired an advocate to help figure out what to do and how to ask for help. It’s not cheap, he says.
About 15 parents, plus a learning-disabilities advocate, congregated at a restaurant recently to decide how to proceed.
“There’ve been some parents who have moved out of the district because of the reading,” Peachey said. “And some of those parents showed up on Saturday simply just to tell us, ‘Look, we had to move out.’ And I’ll be honest, I’ve thought about it.”
However, Donna FarlandSmith, Hilliard Parents United’s president, says the group is trying to keep things positive. Its members hope to work alongside the Hilliard schools and help other parents in their situation.
Farland-Smith, an Ohio State University education professor, did leave Hilliard schools, she said, after Ridgewood Elementary School wasn’t using appropriately trained teachers to work with her dyslexic son.
“I couldn’t navigate the system,” she said. “I know the system, so I wonder what happens to parents who don’t know the system ... I mean, I have a PhD in education.”
But she brought her third-grader back to Hilliard this fall after an issue with the private school where he’d moved. For one thing, it didn’t have any legal obligation to accommodate his disability. The Ridgewood leadership team has changed, she said, and her son is now getting the services he needs.
She’d like for the group to be able to guide other parents and save them some expense, possibly by starting a free tutoring group, staffed with volunteers.
Students with learning disabilities have rights in public schools under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.
Several years ago, a group of Upper Arlington parents organized and fought the school district there, eventually filing a formal complaint with the state. In September 2011, the Ohio Department of Education ruled that Upper Arlington schools were breaking federal law by willfully refusing to acknowledge students’ dyslexia and placing them in remedial classes that weren’t designed to treat their disability.
Upper Arlington-Kids Identified With Dyslexia, or UA-KID, held an event last October to share with the community how much progress had been made, including widespread screening among the youngest children, training for teachers and differentiated instruction.
The Hilliard parents say they were inspired by that effort.