Parents say students in Frederick County with dyslexia face challenges for services

Oct. 14--Thumbing through J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," Wyatt Migdal isn't doing much reading. He's staring at jumbled letters and numbers.

It's a book the seventh-grader at Oakdale Middle School would like to read one day, but right now, he can't. Reading is difficult for him, and it's anything but fun.

"It's really hard and it takes me a while," Wyatt said. "It makes me feel lonely when I can't do it."

Wyatt's story is not uncommon for students like him -- students with dyslexia. In fact, it's far too common.

And parents of students with dyslexia in Frederick County have recently mobilized to advocate for their children to receive services through Frederick County Public Schools so their children don't fall behind.

"There is no good program for these students who have dyslexia," said Wyatt's mother, Marla Migdal.

Decoding the problem

Marla Migdal helped form a Frederick chapter of Decoding Dyslexia Maryland. Decoding Dyslexia advocates for services for students with dyslexia, informs policymakers on legislative issues and empowers families to support their children.

In recent years, school systems have not been able to identify a student as dyslexic. Instead, they are broadly labeled as a student with a "specific learning disability." Students at FCPS with "specific learning disabilities" make up about 24.4 percent of the special education population -- a large group with varied disabilities where there are varied ways to help those students.

Specific learning disabilities include conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain function, and developmental aphasia along with dyslexia. Dyslexia is the most common cause of difficulties with reading, writing and spelling. Roughly 1 in 5 students have some form of language-based learning disability such as dyslexia.

The Maryland State Department of Education issued a technical assistance bulletin last November, offering guidance to school systems when it comes to identifying dyslexia, dyscalculia and dysgraphia.

The school system is developing a program through the newly re-formed curriculum and instruction committee for students with dyslexia to better serve their needs. What that program will look like is still to be determined, though FCPS employees are scheduled to discuss their plan with the board in November.

"We are considering staffing, resource, and training needs, as well as a possible field test this school year," said Jamie Aliveto, director of system accountability and school improvement, in an email.

The district is moving forward with a request for proposals this semester to identify needed training and resources to support a "Structured Literacy Approach for Intervention," Aliveto said.

FCPS hopes to implement programming that will support students with deficiencies in phonology and phonemic awareness, sound-symbol association, syllables, morphology, syntax and semantics.

"We must plan for early identification and intervention, while simultaneously ensuring staff are equipped to support older students who may face similar challenges," Aliveto said.

Sensing a solution

Many parents have advocated for a program called Orton-Gillingham, a multi-sensory instructional approach intended primarily for people who have issues associated with dyslexia such as reading, spelling and writing, to be implemented by the school system. Orton-Gillingham is widely seen as the gold standard for teaching students with dyslexia how to read.

FCPS used to use the Orton-Gillingham program, but moved away from it several years ago. Monocacy Valley Montessori Public Charter School uses the program after Fran Bowman, executive director of Bowman Educational Services in Columbia, implemented the program at that school. She offered to pilot the program for FCPS as part of her dissertation, but the school system declined, and now she teaches the program in Baltimore County.

"[FCPS is] not giving teachers a single tool to use to treat a very specific and diagnosed problem in our county," said Kera Drabick, a parent of a special education student in FCPS. "Orton-Gillingham is proven. There is no other proven program that is as evidence based to treat these children."

One objection to Orton-Gillingham is that it is a high-cost and high-proprietary program, though FCPS did not immediately provide an estimate on how much it would cost for the school system to implement it.

Marla Migdal took some training courses in the program and is now able to train students, including her son, to help them with reading.

While FCPS is working to implement training and programs to assist this demographic of students, parents are concerned that children will continue to fall further behind.

Tara Garwood enrolled one of her two children with dyslexia in a publicly funded private school because the school system couldn't provide her child with the services he needed, she said. She also has a fifth-grader at FCPS who has dyslexia.

Garwood says the main issue for her has been a lack of consistency.

Her oldest son attended a private preschool. Staff there raised concerns regarding his developmental progress and suggested the family contact Child Find. The family met with Child Find and they evaluated her son for speech, occupational therapy and physical therapy.

"They found him to be in 'normal' range, which is less than 25 percent deficient," Garwood said. "He was given [occupational therapy], but denied speech twice. I then had him evaluated by the speech pathologist at the elementary school he would be entering and she said, 'Yes, he needs services and [we] need to start immediately.' So she began working with him prior to starting kindergarten."

Garwood said her children were not allowed to be identified as having dyslexia until third grade.

"Third grade is too late," she said.

Garwood realizes her family has the means to make appropriate adjustments to help her kids get the interventions they need, but she realizes that not every student does.

"My concern now is geared toward the children who are less fortunate," she said.

Drabick expressed concern that her children are falling behind, but doesn't think that would be the case if the school district implemented a program like Orton-Gillingham.

Her son made it from prekindergarten through third grade before a teacher acknowledged that something might be wrong. She said a teacher told her that he sat at his desk for an hour and a half and didn't write a single thing on his paper.

"My son wants to please," Drabick said. "He's never been a behavior problem. His condition was not recognized because [FCPS has] failed to train our teachers and give them tools that are available."

Marla Migdal said each student's issues are different and some students need more interventions and help than others. The school system needs to find a way to accommodate all of those cases, she said.

"They can still learn, they just might have to learn in a different way," she said.

Recognizing success

Frederick County Board of Education member Ken Kerr said he was diagnosed with dyslexia as a kid and grew up struggling to read. When Kerr was in his 20s, he spent his free time playing in a band.

One night, his band was playing at Carroll Creek Tavern, and Kerr headed to the bar between sets. At the bar, he met a man named Bill Sprigg, who was chairman of the music department at Hood College at the time. Sprigg invited Kerr to apply to the college so he could be learn to read music.

"He said, if you want to be a real musician, you're going to have to learn music," Kerr recalled.

Kerr got into Hood's program and had 30 people in his music theory class. Only five finished.

Through that class, Kerr gradually learned to read music and books.

"That summer, I read a book for fun for the first time," Kerr said. "I just had to find a way of learning that worked for me, and music was that."

Kerr, who is now an English professor at Frederick Community College, realizes that there are many students like him that struggle to achieve reading comprehension.

He often keeps his personal experiences in mind as a professor, and, like the rest of the Frederick County Board of Education, Kerr wants to make sure there are services for students who have dyslexia.

"Even in my college courses, you see that some students don't learn the same way as others," Kerr said. "Sometimes you just need to find something they're interested in to get them to learn the material -- like what music was for me."

Finding fluency

Marla Migdal understands that there are ways for Wyatt to get to where he wants to go. But her son has lost a lot of time waiting for services and programs that could help him.

Wyatt excels in other aspects of his education. He took a tech expo class in sixth grade where he had to complete several 3-D printing projects. He made a 3-D printed airplane, and a nickel hockey board.

The conversation flows easier with Wyatt when he's talking about the technology class. It's something he's good at, and comfortable with.

"I felt like I wasn't alone in that class," he said. "Like I was part of the group, and not singled out."

Wyatt spoke to the Board of Education last month, and advocated for services for students with dyslexia again when the Kirwan Commission held a public hearing at Frederick High School. The commission was formed in June 2016, and is tasked with delivering recommendations for state education funding to the Maryland General Assembly by Dec. 31.

Marla Migdal said that courage and ability to read his speech came only because of hours of practicing before taking the podium.

Wyatt "warmed the heart" of William Kirwan when he told the former University of Maryland president that Maryland was his future college of choice.

"I want to go there to play lacrosse," Wyatt said. "But, I know I'm not going to get there if I don't get the help I need."

Follow Allen Etzler on Twitter: @AllenWEtzler.

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