I Think My Child Has Dyslexia--Now What?

So you think your child might have dyslexia. Now what? You ask your child’s teacher. The teacher refers you to the doctor, and the doctor refers you back to the school. Twenty percent of students suffer with some level of dyslexia. It is the most common learning disability in our schools. It is also the most ignored. What’s a parent to do? Advocating for your child is simple, but not easy.

Children with dyslexia exhibit several of these symptoms over a prolonged period of time, not just one or two.

• Late talker
• Unusual or frequent mispronunciations
• Slow to add new vocabulary or can’t recall the correct word
• Trouble learning alphabet, days of the week, address, phone number
• Difficulty with rhyming or retelling nursery rhymes
• Slow to learn to write, or tie shoes, button
• Trouble reading words in isolation
• Sequencing letters gets confused. Ex. girl gril
• Slow to understand prefixes, suffixes, root words and spelling patterns
• Avoids reading aloud
• Difficulty with word problems in math
• Trouble with multistep functions in math
• Confusion with retelling events in sequential order
• Frequent ear infections
• Left / right confusion
• Letter reversals
• Labeled “lazy” or “careless” by teachers and parents

Often times dyslexic students are not performing to their ability, however they are not far enough behind to qualify for services from the school. Most students with dyslexia are in regular classrooms, without assistance, and are struggling! They are falling through the cracks.

Advocating For My Child

Start by requesting in writing to have your child evaluated. This sets a legal time frame for the school to move forward. Before meeting with educators, print out a list of symptoms for dyslexia. WebMD has an excellent one, as does Mayo Clinic. Bright Solutions for Dyslexia has my favorite. Highlight the symptoms your child exhibits. List Specific Observable Behaviors, (SOB’s) you can share. These are things that can be observed by anyone working with your child. Try to keep emotions separate. Doing this will help educators to more closely identify the specific areas of concern.

After the initial meeting, the school will take time to do testing. They will evaluate IQ, learning environment in the classroom, reading and math performance on individually administered tests. These are compared to student performance in the classroom. Then there is a follow up meeting in which results are shared. Schools are terrified to label dyslexia. They will group it under a broad term, Developmental Reading Delays. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in our schools. It is also the most misidentified. Schools will label or identify one or more of the most common symptoms your child has. It might be auditory processing delay, or it could be visual processing delay. It might be a phonemic developmental delay. It might be a motor issue like dysgraphia. All of these are symptoms of dyslexia. Like autism, dyslexia is a broad scale. There are many children who are mildly affected, some are moderately impacted, and still others are profoundly affected. Unless your child is at the high end of the scale, it is likely he or she will not qualify for special services. What this means is that the gap between your child’s performance and ability is not large enough to warrant services. The school needs to wait until a child is far below expected performance. They cannot move until the child is failing! It’s the nature of the system.

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