How do people afford dyslexia?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My 5th grader was just diagnosed with dyslexia. We just paid $5k for the testing and just set up a reading tutoring program 4x a week that will add up to $12k for the school year. Her public school can help with supports but can’t offer any kind of OG tutoring, I imagine that’s the norm.

Luckily we can swing this, but how do low income people afford this?

Pretty sure the public school is required to provide supports

Despite having a dyslexia diagnosis from an external provider, the school is not obligated to offer support unless you can demonstrate a clear academic need. For students in grades K-2, reading levels can vary significantly. I was informed that my child needed to be at least two years behind grade level to qualify for support. This system is flawed; had I waited, my child's self-esteem would have suffered. I chose to hire a private tutor, which helped close the gap. Now that my child is doing better, the school claims everything is fine. This whole process has been extremely frustrating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Louis Morton is a great example https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/19/milloy-goodbye-strivers-survivors-of-dc/

The answer is that most poor dyslexic kids don't ever become competent readers. And by the way, most parents don't even find out their kids are dyslexic, because even if their kid is in pull-out for reading, the teachers don't call it dyslexia. Poor kids who read less well than other kids just believe they are stupid.

I second the other parents who say they wish all schools would teach reading in a way that explicitly teaches the mechanics of reading. I also wish the schools would do more on parts of speech... my 6th grader with dyslexia has great trouble with figuring out words' meaning from context, and part of that is the ignorance of parts of speech.

1. General classroom teachers have zero minutes of training on how to diagnose dyslexia. They’re not calling it dyslexia because they have no idea. Think about that. I graduated from one of the top ten elementary education programs in the entire country, and I have no idea how to diagnose dyslexia. I taught for over a decade before staying home with my child, most of that time in FCPS. Not one training on how to diagnose dyslexia.

2. For years, we were required to use Lucy Caulkins for writing and Fountas & Pinnell for reading. As a young teacher, I threw myself into those programs and felt stupid when they didn’t work. I’d been taught that Fontas and Punnell in particular was a research-based program, and my favorite professor touted the product. When they didn’t work, I worked harder, and did lots of Internet research. Finally, in my 6th year of teaching, I figured out that I couldn’t just follow the reading curriculum. I got better results, but it cost me about five extra hours a week, for the entire year.

Now imagine if I’d had my own kids. I couldn’t have done that extra work. Imagine if I’d had school loans and needed a second job. Imagine if Is taught for four years and thrown in the towel before ever figuring out that I want the problem. There are so many barriers to teachers doing well. We can’t just say that’s the teachers’ problem. They’ll quit. My kids won’t suffer, as they attend a school that other teachers transfer into. But low-income kids will.

This isn’t teachers’ fault. Vilify the people who wrote terrible curricula, trained teachers in terrible curricula, and the people who bought terrible curricula. Teachers have very little say over what they teach, especially the first three years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don’t spend $5k on the evaluation for one thing.

and how do you do that? Different poster but would love to hear the alternatives.

you get the free evals the school will give you adn that's it

If I had waited for that to happen back in 1st grade when I had suspicions, I’d still be waiting. There are a million reasons they won’t test, especially if the kid’s IQ is high.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Low-income kids don't suffer quite as much as middle-class kids, though. Almost all low-income kids have Medicaid which provides PT, OT, speech therapy, etc. Are those services provided the best available? No, but it is something.

What really hurts the low-income kids is not having support at home. I used to work in a VA school system with a large population of low-income families. The kids who thrived the most were those who had supportive parents to also go over therapies with the kids at home and do extra work.

It's pathetic that not all kids are eligible for Medicaid in the US. Private insurance that so many middle-class moms and dads have through their jobs either covers no extra services or very few sessions, like under 10.

Do you ... hear yourself?

You clearly have no experience with actually using medicaid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They don’t, because it is unaffordable. This is why the percent of people in prison with learning disabilities is astronomical - if you can’t read, if your school day makes you feel like an utter failure, if you drop out of high school…your chances of going to prison skyrocket.

My dyslexic kid is a senior, and he’ll go to college in part because we had the money for remediation and private school, and also because we had the kind of jobs where we could take time off to take him to tutoring. I could totally see him dropping out of high school if we hadn’t been dragging him/cheerleading him through it all.

Fixed it for you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You don’t have to do that stuff. My father and siblings all have dyslexia. No tutoring was ever done for any of them. They are all successful engineers.

Cool story bro. If only it worked that way for most kids. Guess what, it doesn't.

My experience with my kids and dyslexia is that no one would talk about it. I'd ask my kids pediatrician, eventually our first educational advocate, a vision therapy doctor, the school system and no one would address the issue or answer questions. I'm in Loudoun and it seemed like no one would talk about it or address my questions when I was concerned about it.

I have a brother with dyslexia. The school system we attended did far more for him back in the 70s than our public school system does for children now. Despite his high IQ, the military was his only option and despite a long career he never rose above a low rank.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Imagine a place where -
All children were screened for dyslexia?
All reading instruction was "OG" (or another approach that supported students with dyslexia)

All children would benefit from this approach - not just students with Dyslexia. The costs to train teachers would offset the down stream costs.

But no - the money goes to those who can lobby the strongest. [I am looking at you Reading Recovery].
It is criminal as they knew that the approach they were using was not supporting children.

Most parents have no clue about the different instructional programs and this was incredibly confusing for me. Also they were very hot topics that would cause an immediate hostile reaction from teachers and admins at my kids school. It was a minefield that I never understood and it made it very hard for parents to know what to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is estimated that 50% of our prison population is dyslexic. It’s a shame and also a huge waste of resources that we don’t invest in these kids and end up paying down the road.

The studies done reported a high percentage of prisoners with DISABILITIES, not specifically dyslexia.
The studies done in 2016 didn't whittle things down to dyslexia specifically. A large percentage of the inmates self report having cognitive disabilities. Because most of the studies rely upon inmate self reporting the number is probably much higher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's a terrible situation. I did the Barton method with my child. Luckily he is only mildly dyslexic, he needs extra reading and writing practice. But it's time off work/my personal time and who knows, we may need tutors later on. Insurance did not help. He didn't qualify for the school evaluation so we just moved on without them.

Let's talk about that last statement. In my county the public school does everything they can to look the other way at children who have disabilities. The kid could be failing in every possible way academically, socially, and behavior wise and the school staff will see nothing and refuse to evaluate. I had to harangue my kid's school admin for an eval to be done. Their evaluation was so much less helpful than the one I eventually paid for that only cost $2k.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don’t spend $5k on the evaluation for one thing.

and how do you do that? Different poster but would love to hear the alternatives.

you get the free evals the school will give you adn that's it

If I had waited for that to happen back in 1st grade when I had suspicions, I’d still be waiting. There are a million reasons they won’t test, especially if the kid’s IQ is high.

DP - IME, it's the opposite, since most public school systems still use the discrepancy model. It's the kids who are otherwise very smart and who struggle with reading who get attention in public schools without much advocacy from parents. That describes my dyslexic kid to a T. Our public ES was fully onboard with Tier 2 intervention, then testing, and now a behemoth of an IEP (we'll see how well it's implemented).

The kids who truly fall through the cracks are the ones with average-ish IQ, because the system doesn't see much of a discrepancy between that and struggling to read. That's a failure of the system, but it's very common. They just keep getting promoted and everyone thinks they're just "average," not, hey, this kid really can't read and gee, maybe that's impacting their academic performance.

There are also free and low-cost programs based on Phono-Graphix with strong evidence (the Reading Reflex book and also materials through EBLI and Reading Simplified). As a parent, they've been a good supplement to the other services DS has.

That's interesting because my 2E kid was being passed over because he was so sweet and paid attention and had a good vocabulary. I got "things will click soon!" for a year before I just paid for the testing myself and found out he's extremely dyslexic.

Same experience here. "Your kid is so smart it's going to resolve itself. We aren't worried about your kid at all."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm a special ed lawyer. When a parent calls my office with a diagnosis of dyslexia, more than nine times out of ten that parent is upper middle class.

What is your point?

My assumption is that this is true because only the parents who can afford evaluations know that their children have dyslexia.

Also as a pp has tried to explain, public schools don't diagnose students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm a special ed lawyer. When a parent calls my office with a diagnosis of dyslexia, more than nine times out of ten that parent is upper middle class.

What is your point?

My assumption is that this is true because only the parents who can afford evaluations know that their children have dyslexia.

Also as a pp has tried to explain, public schools don't diagnose students.

Public schools should be identifying kids with specific learning disability, in reading ( and other areas). I feel like it’s just another form of gaslighting, “we don’t identify dyslexia” but you do identify SLD.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don’t spend $5k on the evaluation for one thing.

and how do you do that? Different poster but would love to hear the alternatives.

you get the free evals the school will give you adn that's it

If I had waited for that to happen back in 1st grade when I had suspicions, I’d still be waiting. There are a million reasons they won’t test, especially if the kid’s IQ is high.

DP - IME, it's the opposite, since most public school systems still use the discrepancy model. It's the kids who are otherwise very smart and who struggle with reading who get attention in public schools without much advocacy from parents. That describes my dyslexic kid to a T. Our public ES was fully onboard with Tier 2 intervention, then testing, and now a behemoth of an IEP (we'll see how well it's implemented).

The kids who truly fall through the cracks are the ones with average-ish IQ, because the system doesn't see much of a discrepancy between that and struggling to read. That's a failure of the system, but it's very common. They just keep getting promoted and everyone thinks they're just "average," not, hey, this kid really can't read and gee, maybe that's impacting their academic performance.

There are also free and low-cost programs based on Phono-Graphix with strong evidence (the Reading Reflex book and also materials through EBLI and Reading Simplified). As a parent, they've been a good supplement to the other services DS has.

That's interesting because my 2E kid was being passed over because he was so sweet and paid attention and had a good vocabulary. I got "things will click soon!" for a year before I just paid for the testing myself and found out he's extremely dyslexic.

Same experience here. "Your kid is so smart it's going to resolve itself. We aren't worried about your kid at all."

Earlier PP - I'm really sorry you both had that experience. That sucks. My DS is also very sweet, has a high vocabulary, good classmate and friend, etc. - not a kid who caused any trouble in the classroom, ever. No one at school was concerned until second grade, but I don't think that's unreasonable, given the variability in when even non-dyslexic kids read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm a special ed lawyer. When a parent calls my office with a diagnosis of dyslexia, more than nine times out of ten that parent is upper middle class.

What is your point?

My assumption is that this is true because only the parents who can afford evaluations know that their children have dyslexia.

Also as a pp has tried to explain, public schools don't diagnose students.

My point is that the answer to the question "how do people afford dyslexia" is "either they're rich or they don't." They get the services for SLD at school, but without a dyslexia diagnosis, because they can't pay for evaluations, and without things like OG because they can't afford them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm a special ed lawyer. When a parent calls my office with a diagnosis of dyslexia, more than nine times out of ten that parent is upper middle class.

What is your point?

My assumption is that this is true because only the parents who can afford evaluations know that their children have dyslexia.

Also as a pp has tried to explain, public schools don't diagnose students.

PP is a lawyer. Poor and middle class people know they can't afford lawyers. Of course the people calling are upper middle class, they're they only ones who can afford to litigate. A middle class family may stretch for an advocate, but that's it