In Which My Son Could Have Been Born Into a Different Family

A week ago I posted about how Squirrelboy lost the genetic lottery when it comes to the invisible disabilities he could have inherited. He not only got my ADHD and Mr. Engineer's dyslexia, he got a more severe version of both. However, he's blessed to have won the situational lottery, by having been born to well educated upper middle class white parents who knew how to advocate for him and had the resources to get him the intervention he needed.

I have often wondered what would have happened to Squirrelboy if he had been born into another family. Of course, he couldn't literally have been born into another family, but children with disabilities like his are born into other families every day. Unfortunately, not all of those families have the knowledge, the resources, or the will to get their children the services they need to be successful in life.

While I was homeschooling Squirrelboy I met many families who had pulled their children out of school because the school wasn't serving their learning disabilities well, or, worse yet, was ignoring those disabilities altogether. Many of these parents had made great sacrifices of their time and income in order to give their children an education that would allow them to thrive.

Unfortunately, the majority of children with learning and attention disabilities don't have parents who are able to provide them with an individualized education at home. Most children with learning and attention disabilities are educated in the public system, and a huge percentage of them do no receive the accommodations and services they need.

I'm not blaming the teachers who let these kids fall through the cracks. As I've discussed before, even most reading specialists are not well educated in dyslexia. There are always exceptions, but the large majority of teachers want to see all their students succeed and will everything they have in their toolboxes to make that happen. Unfortunately, their toolboxes may only include a hammer and a Phillips head screwdriver when the tool little Johnny needs is an 1/8 inch Allen wrench.

One of the greatest disservices done to students with disabilities that are not diagnosed before they enter kindergarten is the concept of "waiting to fail." The idea behind this seems good on the surface. Children develop at different rates, and the idea is to wait until the end of second grade to let children catch up before evaluating them for learning disabilities. I'm sure there are a few children for whom this policy works. If a child is bright and has no learning disabilities, but comes into kindergarten with minimal exposure to books and letters, that child will eventually catch up with a good standard education.

However, students with dyslexia will never learn to read well without targeted intervention, and the earlier that intervention begins, the greater the chance of success. Despite evidence of this fact, parents are often told that it's not possible to diagnose dyslexia until 3rd grade.  This is patently untrue, and even the National Institute of Health knows it, but all too many schools don't.
Children only get evaluated earlier if their parents know enough to suspect dyslexia early on and aren't afraid to speak truth to power when it comes to advocating for their children.

Since I'm proficient in Spanish, I was sometimes called upon by Squirrelboy's elementary teachers to work with students from Spanish speaking families who came into the school with little or no knowledge of English. Squirrelboy's school had a strong ESL program and those students got a lot of support and most of them were working at or above grade level in English within a couple of years. All the students I worked with who came into the school in the upper grades could read and write proficiently in Spanish and just needed to transfer those skills.

I wondered what would happen, though, to a student with dyslexia who entered school with limited English proficiency. Chances are that student's struggles would be attributed to lack of English proficiency and a learning disability would not even enter the discussion until late in elementary school, possibly even later than third grade, when evaluations are most often considered. If the student's parents are immigrants with limited English proficiency and no understanding of the public school system and their rights to advocate for their child, that child would experience significant failure before any attempt at intervention began. All too often these are the kids who develop serious behavior problems and drop out of school as soon as they can.

This is much less common, but kids with invisible disabilities can also be held back by their parents. Homeschooling parents can fool themselves into thinking that their children will read "when they're ready", and continue to pursue a standard education with accommodations because they have an idea that having a label will hurt their child in the future. I have a friend who taught for a time at at Christian high school that admitted quite a few students who had been homeschooled through 8th grade. She told me about a few students she had who showed every sign of dyslexia, but who had never received any intervention because their parents did not want them to be labeled. These students struggled greatly at this rigorous high school, but their parents continued to believe that a label would be more damaging to them than failure.

My dream is for dyslexia, ADHD, and other invisible disabilities to be destigmatized so that parents are not afraid to seek out labels for their kids if they show signs of these disabilities. The second part of the dream is for public school teachers and administrators to be thoroughly educated in these disabilities and others and to begin identification and intervention as early as possible, allowing all of their students to succeed instead of waiting for some to fail.

Squirrelboy is successful today because he was given the supports and interventions he needed. It breaks my heart that not only is this not true for every child, it is not true for a large percentage of children with the same challenges he has.