Truth, Paperwork & Pushback. Stories, strategy and sarcasm.

In the spring of my son’s senior year, I requested his K-3 reading screeners. With the advocacy lens I have now, I just wanted to see them. What did we miss? What did THEY miss? Was there anything in those early years pointing toward dyslexia? Because it still hits me that it took until 8th grade for anyone to truly recognize there was something going on, and even then, it wasn’t the school who figured it out. I wrote the email, reread it probably 159 times, and finally pressed send. My friend and I always use the same phrase after sending something like that: “And now we wait.” Part of me wasn’t even sure if I really wanted to see the results. I knew they could make me angry or sad or confused, or all of the above. But early literacy data isn’t random paperwork. It’s the foundation of a child’s educational story. So when I got the follow-up saying they couldn’t find them, I felt sick. Wait… what? How do you lose screeners? Aren’t they part of a child’s record? How is this even ...

How did I keep going when I felt hopeless and powerless? That’s a tough question to answer. Bottom line, I sure as hell wasn’t accepting failure when it came to my kids’ future, just like I never accepted it for mine. To backtrack a little bit, I too struggled in school. I was born in the late 70’s and learning disabilities were just not a big thing at that time. I always wanted to do well and couldn’t understand why I kept failing - I knew I was smart, but school was hard. Every August, I promised myself I’d finally get my act together - study, read, do the work. By mid-October, I was toast. School was so overwhelming to me that it crushed my soul. It made me feel worthless, and honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be successful. I remember being in some sort of pull-out reading intervention in Elementary School. And I remember feeling like a loser for being in there. I’m not sure why that intervention ever stopped, but I can tell you it was a mistake. I didn’t read a book cover to ...