WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Susan Collins brought the story of one Maine mother’s long struggle to get help for her dyslexic son before a national audience this week, using a Senate roundtable to spotlight the obstacles families face when trying to secure early diagnosis and meaningful support in public schools.
During a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee roundtable on dyslexia, Collins introduced Jessica Belvill of Union, a special educator at St. George Municipal School Unit in Tenants Harbor, who took part in a panel of teachers and parents of students with dyslexia. Belvill then described what she said was a years-long battle to get her son, Chase, the support he needed in Maine’s school system.
Belvill told lawmakers her son’s story began when he entered kindergarten and school quickly became a source of fear and frustration. She said he was terrified of writing and would often hide under the table during class. Because dyslexia runs in the family, Belvill said they asked about screening, only to later learn that although Maine required mandatory dyslexia screening at the time, it had not been done for him.
What followed, according to Belvill, was years of punishment instead of help.
She testified that her son was repeatedly sent to the principal’s office, removed from class, and sometimes sent home early because the school did not have enough staff to support him. Behaviors that were later understood as signs of a child struggling to make sense of words on a page were, she said, treated as defiance. For years, Belvill said, she pushed for evaluations only to be told her son was not trying hard enough, did not care, or was deliberately disrupting the classroom.
It was not until third grade that the school finally evaluated him and confirmed he had dyslexia, Belvill said. She then found a private tutor trained in the Orton-Gillingham Approach, and for the first time, she said, her son began to make progress. His confidence improved and he became happier. But when she asked the school to help cover the cost, she was told that was not an option. When COVID hit and the tutor closed, that support disappeared.
Belvill also recounted another setback. She said the school recommended what sounded like a promising program with small-group instruction and one-on-one help from a teacher trained for dyslexia. But she later learned it was a day treatment program for students with severe behavioral challenges. She said her son found himself in an environment marked by chaos, where furniture was thrown and students were removed for safety. Soon, he began refusing to go to school.
Only after continued advocacy, Belvill said, was he moved back into a general education classroom, where his anxiety eased and he began to smile and make friends again. Later, after transferring to a small public school outside the district, he received one-on-one tutoring, access to audiobooks, hands-on learning, and what his mother described as the respect he had long been denied. There, she said, he thrived and graduated eighth grade with confidence and hope.
But Belvill told senators that the problems returned when her son entered high school.
Now a freshman, she said, his IEP lists his disability as emotional disturbance rather than dyslexia because the family was told dyslexia could not be included. She said he has been placed in study halls because the school cannot find classes where he fits, suspended for not doing his work, and given speech-to-text tools he is embarrassed to use because he is the only student in class using them. She also said that when he expressed interest in vocational school to learn welding, the response was discouraging, with the school telling him he likely would not be accepted because of his grades.
Belvill told the panel that her son is bright, capable, and talented with hands-on work, but that the message he has absorbed over the years is that he is inadequate. She said her family is working every day to undo that damage. His experience, she argued, reflects a broader national failure to consistently identify, support, and understand dyslexia in public schools.
Following her testimony, Collins underscored the importance of early diagnosis and asked whether a child’s chances of receiving that diagnosis vary significantly depending on where they live in Maine.
Belvill said access can depend on the school, but geography remains a major obstacle. She said some smaller schools may not fully understand the importance of early screening, while specialized dyslexia schools in Maine can be hours away for rural families. Even now, she said, getting services remains the hardest part.
Collins said the lesson was clear: children should be able to get the basic tools they need regardless of where they live. And in Belvill’s testimony, she pointed to what happened once an accurate diagnosis and proper support were finally in place, a transformation that should not take years of struggle to achieve.
