Every month, about two dozen North County parents gather at the Round Table Pizza restaurant in Rancho Penasquitos to discuss how frustrating it can be to obtain help for their dyslexic children.
Moms and dads take turns identifying themselves, then launch into rants about the shortcomings of individualized educational plans, also known as IEPs. They talk about the cost and difficulty in finding professionals to assess their children and they worry about the self-esteem issues that can plague kids when they slip behind in school.
“There’s some crying,” said 44-year-old Jennifer Tanner, a Carlsbad parent with two dyslexic children who said she was also diagnosed with the disability a year ago. “Having a group like this is pretty powerful.”
Tanner and other parents said things may now be turning a corner in getting educators to better understand the problem. Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law last month that requires schools to set guidelines to assess struggling readers for dyslexia.
The disorder — in which a person has trouble mastering reading, spelling, writing and math skills — affects as many as 80 percent of California students with learning disabilities in special education, according to Kathy Futterman, an expert with a grassroots organization Decoding Dyslexia California, which lobbied for the new legislation.
“The guidelines are needed for training in districts where they are not well versed on dyslexia,” said Futterman, who also is a supervisor in educational psychology and teacher education at California State University East Bay. “None of the guidelines is mandated, however, so the district can still say, ‘Sorry, we don’t have the funds.’ We hope parents make sure that districts don’t turn a blind eye.”
Advocates see the new law as an important first step.
“The schools still don’t screen. That’s what we’d like to have,” said Stacey Cavaglieri, who also attends the Round Table gatherings, and has dyslexic children who attend Twin Peaks Middle School and Painted Rock Elementary School in the Poway Unified district.
Cavaglieri said she has spent thousands of dollars trying to get help for her kids, and has grown accustomed to paying for much of their educational needs — something that she’d like to change with future iterations of the dyslexia law.
For instance, Cavaglieri’s kids regularly listen to audio books of popular kid fiction stories, like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, just to keep up with their classmates. They also have audio books of textbooks used in their classes.
“It helps them to keep up with grade level material,” said Cavaglieri, who said that she pays for audio books, which her children access on iPads.
Still, the law, AB 1369, should help raise awareness of dyslexia as a learning disability, and help parents gain firepower to obtain IEPs for their children who need special assistance, some parents and advocates said.
Because of the legislation, the California Department of Education will begin work in the spring on coming up with so-called “best practices” guidelines to help school districts improve assessment of students with learning disabilities. The guidelines go into effect in the 2017-18 school year, and will require individual districts to post information on their websites to help teachers find a proven, evidence-based approach for teaching reading to students with dyslexia.
“This is the first volley, probably to raise awareness,” said Bruce Kramer, senior director of the North Coastal Consortium for Special Education.
“It shines a spotlight on dyslexia. It’s a wake-up call (to school districts),” said Kramer, who monitors compliance and provides funding and professional development on special education programs for 14 North San Diego County school districts for the San Diego County Office of Education.
Kramer said that AB 1369 was weakened substantially from its original version earlier this year when introduced by a Northern California lawmaker. For instance, the bill had originally included a provision that would have required all kindergarten to third-grade students be screened annually for learning disabilities, specifically dyslexia. That controversial provision would have wreaked financial havoc on local school districts because it would have required schools to assess every kid for dyslexia, Kramer said.
“It would have been a huge cost,” he said.
