The Screeners I Never Got to See

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 possible?

This was back in April 2025. Life went on, and like everything else on the emotional conveyor belt of parenting, I pushed it aside. But months later it popped back into my mind, and I thought, I’m going to FERPA everything. It will be good practice as an advocate anyway.

Guess what?
Still no K-3 screeners.

The explanation I got was that they “appear to have been treated as temporary records.” That didn’t sit right, especially since those screeners were referenced in his 504 meetings. How does something that informed his plan suddenly become temporary?

At that point, I dug deeper. I looked back at some of his early paperwork, and with the lens I have now, I saw things I wish I had understood back then. One of the earliest consent forms had PPT and special education crossed out and replaced with 504. The only evaluation the district ever completed was OT, even though early concerns existed in more than one area. That isn’t a comprehensive evaluation. It never was.

And of course hindsight is cruel. You start piecing together the signs you didn’t know how to interpret at the time. The letter and number reversals, the avoidance of reading, the confusion that didn’t match his intelligence. Things that, today, I could spot in under 10 seconds.

He has double-deficit dyslexia. One of the most severe forms. And yet he made it all the way to middle school without anyone asking the right questions. And that’s not on teachers. Many of his teachers truly cared about him and I know that. This wasn’t a teacher problem. This was a district-level, system-level failure.

That’s the part that still hurts: the system decided what they thought he needed, and they stuck to it. And the child, my child, paid for that. Not them. Not the adults making the decisions. Kids are the ones who end up carrying the frustration, the confusion, the missed support, and the long-term consequences of choices that weren’t good enough. And none of that magically disappears just because they graduate.

Missing records, crossed-out forms, incomplete evaluations. Those things shaped his entire educational experience.

I can’t change any of it. I can’t get the screeners back. But I can document it now. I can say out loud what should have never happened. And I can hope that the people in charge now will choose to do better than the people who made these decisions back then.

Because families deserve better.
Kids deserve better.
And silence is how the system keeps getting away with it.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Failure Becomes Fuel

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 ...
Read more

The IEP table isn't as equal as they say.....

  I can promise you that no parent walks into that room wanting to fight. All we want is for the school district to understand who our child is, what they struggle with, and brainstorm how the district can support those little humans that we love so much. You spend many nights before the meeting lying awake, role-playing in your head. You spend your days researching, overthinking, preparing, and looking for any past evidence you can find to prove your point. Then you walk into that meeting. You, a regular education teacher, a special education teacher, an “administrator,” and anyone else who can contribute—which sometimes can be multiple other people. You hear that you are just as much a part of the team as the many other people in that room. But are you? Because it seems to me that you’re outnumbered. The school team asks for your input, which you give. The input you’ve spent days gathering. The input that you think will hold a lot of weight… And then you hear it. Those fiv...
Read more

When Advocacy Breaks You - And How I Kept Going Anyway

 Let’s talk about the emotional trauma you experience as a parent advocating for your child. Never in a million years had I imagined this was even a thing when I sent my first child to school. I truly believed they had his best interests at heart and would do whatever was needed to help him learn and grow. Well, that thought didn’t last very long. “What do you mean you don’t see that he can’t sit still? Or that he can’t focus for more than five seconds? Or write with normal spacing and letter height on the lines of the paper?” “So wait, you’re saying it’s okay that he’s writing letters backwards?” That one still throws me for a loop. “We can read what he writes,” they said. Eventually, it turned into: “It’s just his ADHD.” And I fell for it. Repeatedly. I walked out of every meeting feeling like an overprotective mom. That mom. And it didn’t just end with my oldest son. It continued with my other children too. “We don’t see that here.” Okay, great. Just because you don’t...
Read more