Dyslexia in MCPS

[Anonymous]

+1 on the voucher. Hopefully with the pandemic people will see the light. MCPS only wants your money.

[Anonymous]

For MCPS families with a new dyslexia dx and low appetite for long fights, what is the play? Where do you find a tutor? How long would 5x/week tutoring need to last? Are there Bethesda area privates equipped for kids with dyslexia? What's the best bet--a SN school or a regular private? Do any religious schools outperform MCPS? We just want this guy to learn to read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For MCPS families with a new dyslexia dx and low appetite for long fights, what is the play? Where do you find a tutor? How long would 5x/week tutoring need to last? Are there Bethesda area privates equipped for kids with dyslexia? What's the best bet--a SN school or a regular private? Do any religious schools outperform MCPS? We just want this guy to learn to read.

Probably be better to ask in the Kids with Special Needs section.

[Anonymous]

I’ll take a gander. We discovered three school districts at least paid for teachers to get ASDEC training. MCPS won’t do that for flat out corrupt reasons - they only fund internal training. DC Public Schools, Frederick County and Loudoun. If private you can’t do much better than Siena in Silver Spring. If need a little cheaper you could consider Jemicy - in Baltimore County. For tutors we lost time listening to retired teachers trying to hook each other up with side gigs. Forget that. Go with ASDEC certified teacher in Rockville or some other reputable training center. We need vouchers for these kids or a charter school for dyslexics like NY City public school system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For MCPS families with a new dyslexia dx and low appetite for long fights, what is the play? Where do you find a tutor? How long would 5x/week tutoring need to last? Are there Bethesda area privates equipped for kids with dyslexia? What's the best bet--a SN school or a regular private? Do any religious schools outperform MCPS? We just want this guy to learn to read.

Speaking from experience, tutoring 5x / week would be fatiguing for everyone. Our DC tutored 2x / week during school year and 3x / week during summer. It took us 5 years.

I don't know the age of your child, but I'm guessing it's pretty young. We got our DX in 2nd grade.

Good luck. Our DC is now a senior in AP Lit, which is clearly not their strongest class, but the fact that we're there is pretty amazing.

[Anonymous]

I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to resurrect it to ask whether this has improved at all.

My kid has dyslexia and ADHD. She also has a high IQ (136). She’s going into 2nd grade.

We’re currently paying nearly $100,000/year for private school and tutoring. It’s helping, but is a financial stranglehold.

I know MD passed legislation mandating dyslexia screening. Has that improved the situation at all, or are we better off just continuing to pay for private school and tutoring?

[Anonymous]

Mcps fails kids with learning disabilities-- they socially promote while failing to provide proper remediation

[Anonymous]

Some kids seem to be getting adequate services for dyslexia, like at Flora Singer ES. It depends on the school at this point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some kids seem to be getting adequate services for dyslexia, like at Flora Singer ES. It depends on the school at this point.

Given how critical immediate intervention is when it comes to dyslexia, it’s really tragic that parents have to just hope their kid is at the right school.

Upwards of 20% of kids have dyslexia. This is not a situation where it’s some sort of rare thing that only impacts a tiny percentage of kids.

It’s criminal that this district is so inadequate on this, especially when we know what works: consistent tutoring with an Orton-Gillingham approach, which really should be baked into the overall reading curriculum for K-3.

[Anonymous]

Very school by school but generally getting better. I would e-mail the reading specialist at your local school to get general information on how they would handle the child. They would refer you to special education but at least you can see if OG is at the school. It usually is.

[Anonymous]

Our third grader was diagnosed with specific learning disability/dyslexia at the end of second grade. The data used to diagnose him came from testing MCPS did, which was thorough and IMO an accurate reflection of his strengths and weaknesses. He has a hefty IEP that's being implemented this year, including 90 minutes of daily reading instruction (mostly small group and not all at once), along with other accommodations. We may need to supplement more if they insist on OG only, but I'm hoping for flexibility to use more accelerated evidence-based approaches.

We haven't had to fight the school at all, yet. They implemented an evidence-based Tier 2 intervention last year and then we moved to the evaluation/IEP when he failed to respond to that. So, apparently our school is a unicorn, but in our experience, at least MCPS can and does identify "dyslexia" and is helping to remediate it.

[Anonymous]

I can’t even find dyslexia or specific reading disability mentioned on the MCPS website.

Can anyone direct me to anything published by MCPS that talks about what they do for kids who struggle in reading?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to resurrect it to ask whether this has improved at all.

My kid has dyslexia and ADHD. She also has a high IQ (136). She’s going into 2nd grade.

We’re currently paying nearly $100,000/year for private school and tutoring. It’s helping, but is a financial stranglehold.

I know MD passed legislation mandating dyslexia screening. Has that improved the situation at all, or are we better off just continuing to pay for private school and tutoring?

Um, tiniest violin ever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to resurrect it to ask whether this has improved at all.

My kid has dyslexia and ADHD. She also has a high IQ (136). She’s going into 2nd grade.

We’re currently paying nearly $100,000/year for private school and tutoring. It’s helping, but is a financial stranglehold.

I know MD passed legislation mandating dyslexia screening. Has that improved the situation at all, or are we better off just continuing to pay for private school and tutoring?

Um, tiniest violin ever.

Making fun of someone for struggling to pay for support for their SN child. A new low for DCUM.

[Anonymous]

Mcps doesn't do dyslexia well. Many times they don't evaluate kids until they are 1-2 years below grade level. At that point it becomes very hard to catch up. Sadly, many of these kids will remain illiterate or with low literacy. Problem #2 is that even when thry identify kids early with dysleixa in mcps, they don't have the resources to adequately remediate the disability. The child will receive heavy tech accommodations (text to speech) because again, the disability is not treated.