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.
Wow — as someone in the education field, this disgust me, and I’m gonna add the two things that come to my immediate mind which means it’s probably a lot worse than this even appears.
First, assuming the child is dyslexic, or even assuming that there is dyslexia in the family because it is very much inherited, there is something like a 40 to 50% chance the child also has ADHD. Those two are very much found together, and my personal theory is that ADHD causes dyslexia, but that’s just my theory.
i’m thinking, inattentive ADHD here and the reason I suspect it is the child hiding under the desk. The child not wanting to go to school, the child being punished for not doing his work, and the child freaking out from the behavioral sped classroom that he was sent to. Other children might enjoy watching the antics.
ADHD is something like 70% to 80% inherited between parent and child and I very much noticed that she did not sit still while she was reading her speech. There are other explanations, she also may have been nervous, but inability to sit still it’s an indication of ADHD, particularly at her age.
so I definitely would screen for ADHD, and under federal law, IDEA the district must pay for that. She should never have signed the IEP because once she did, she’s accepting the fact that his only disability is emotional disturbance, that he isn’t dyslexic, and that the only accommodations they’ll provide for him is discipline for the emotional disturbance.
They lied to her because not only could both be put on IEP if both existed, she has the right to demand that they address the dyslexia in the IEP and if they don’t, she goes to Augusta and ask them to have a hearing.
I don’t know how good Augusta is at having these hearings or how much the people who conduct them know but if you’re not happy with that, you’re gonna have two more options one is to follow a complaint with what used to be the federal department of education. I’m not sure if it’s now the department of justice or what they’re doing but somebody has an office of civil rights. SEN Collins will know which department is doing OCR now.
And her other option is to go to federal court and sue the town for violation of the child civil rights. ADA is a civil right and what the school appears to have done is the same thing as kicking a kid out because he’s black, something you can’t do. Suing takes money and schools get away with a lot of stuff because they know most parents don’t have the $20,000 for a retainer to sue.
The second thing here, which I find infuriating, is that they labeled the child as behavior SPED, i.e. emotional disability, although I don’t believe that’s the DSM and it sounds very vague for a professional to diagnose. But also an awful lot of sloppy paperwork in the SPED field.
This explains why they sent him to what was a behavioral sped classroom and I would define that as child abuse, not a term I use lightly.
Susan Collins did very good today, hopefully there are a few people in Augusta Washington with the same background I have and the filing in front of them (which I don’t) and willingness to ask the questions that need to be asked.
IDEA is individuals with disability education act — federal law.
The other one I neglected to mention is FAPE, all children are entitled to a “free and appropriate public education“, that’s also law.
A third law is FERPA which some people still call the Buckley amendment.
That’s the family educational records privacy act, and it means you have a right to see your child school records, including the records.
One caveat here is that you do not have the same level of privacy protections that you do under HIPAA, FERPA allows the school to share the records for any school related purpose, does not even require that be the best interest of the child.
this particularly becomes an issue when the school is possession of medical records, including psych records. They essentially have the right to share them with just about anyone and that’s one of the problems with in school medical clinics and school counselors. This is a bigger issue in college, but still something to be aware of.
And DSM is Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — the big book that defines every mental illness. We currently are on the fifth version (DSM-V). most larger libraries have a copy in the reference department, as do larger colleges and possibly county law libraries. Any confident librarian can tell you where to find it.
likewise, any confident librarian can help you find the rest of this case, although just googling the 518 F.3d 1275 will find it for you.
JARRON DRAPER, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
ATLANTA INDEPENDENT SCHOOL SYSTEM, Defendant-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia D. C. Docket No. 06-00487-CV-MHS-1.
518 F.3d 1275
No. 07-11777
Decided: March 6, 2008
The opinion of the court was delivered by: Pryor, Circuit Judge
Before HULL and PRYOR, Circuit Judges, and MOORE [1], District Judge.
The issue in this appeal is whether the district court abused its discretion when it awarded a student who is disabled placement in a private school as compensation for violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 20 U.S.C. §§ 1400-1482. Jarron Draper entered the Atlanta Independent School System as a student in the second grade. After years of conflict with the School System, Draper’s family requested and received an administrative hearing about his education. By then, Draper was 18 years old and in the eleventh grade, but he could read at only a third-grade level. The administrative law judge entered extensive findings and awarded Draper relief, and the district court, after both parties sought review, adopted the findings and increased the award. Draper is now 21 years old. The School System concedes that it violated some of Draper’s rights and, in one year, provided him a deficient educational program, but the School System argues that other violations are either barred by the statute of limitations or not supported by the record. The School System also contends that Draper must be educated in a public school and that Draper’s award is disproportionate to the violations of his rights. This appeal reminds us of words written by the late Judge John Minor Wisdom about a denial of educational opportunity in a different era: “A man should be able to find an education by taking the broad highway. He should not have to take by-roads through the woods and follow winding trails through sharp thickets, in constant tension because of the pitfalls and traps, and, after years of effort, perhaps attain the threshold of his goal when he is past caring about it.” Meredith v. Fair, 298 F.2d 696, 703 (5th Cir. 1962). Because the district court did not abuse its broad discretion to fashion appropriate relief under the Act, we affirm.
I
Another Mills failure in education.
Dr. Ed has listed several laws and requirements to help those kids who need it. Some have been in existence for 50 years. Is there data available to track the success/ failure of, say, children with dyslexia who have participated in prescribed programs?
There is a massive bureaucracy from the federal education department on down to each local school district which is supposed to help these children. Most of it started in the 1970s. Has student achievement improved since all of this “help” came into the public schools?
Senator Collins will end up advocating for more money to be thrown at a failed system. It’s the compassionate thing to do for the children.
I’m sorry for this mother and child and share the frustration.
Can we get a link to this to post? The Mills Mafia don’t care about kids period. She and her cronies get “off” on belittling, abusing, shaming, degrading anyone including children. She’s the ultimate bully. This story needs to get out.
The short answer to John’s question is no, there is neither accountability nor evaluation of sped outcomes. The longer answer is sort of — the NAEP, national assessment of educational progress that I dearly hope that Trump does not eliminate as the data goes all the way back to 1969, when it was the Department of HEW.
In theory, if sped was successful, we wouldn’t continue to see the decrease in scores that we are seeing. Sort of, and I sound like I’m describing a trip across Penobscot Bay in thick fog, I am. For a variety of reasons, including both administrators and the teachers unions, we don’t really have valid statistics that tell us the things we would like to know.
And they don’t want us to — the state could take the gross income of every Maine taxpayer who is 26 years old, correlate that by Social Security number to the academic record of the same person 10 years early at the age 16, and then tell us which high schools lead to kids getting good jobs and which high schools don’t.
You’d have to adjust the data both in terms of what county the 26-year-old is living in and for the attrition out of state because it’s a given that the best students at Katadhin High School aren’t staying there, particularly with all the mills closed. And if the Kennebunk McDonald’s is actually paying what they claim they’re offering, that’s more than a good job in Machias or Fort Kent.
You’d have to jump through a lot of ethical hoops to ensure privacy, but you have the Social Security numbers of every student receiving SPED services at age 16 and you could look at their income (if any) reported to the state at age 26. This would be interesting.
Remember one important thing about SPED — only the bottom of the curve is served.
We are increasing concentrating more and more resources on students who really can’t benefit from it instead of concentrating other students who actually could.
With the dual caveat that it isn’t fair to look at this way, and then that I’m only explaining it this way so that people outside of the education profession and don’t think in terms of bell curve distributions can understand it — think of it like this.
There are the students who are failing — all Fs even if they can be graded.
on the numerical scale, 0% to 59%
There are the students who get Ds, above 59%
There are the students who get Cs, above 69%
There are the students who get Bs, above 79%
There are the students who get A’s, above 89%
I know it’s not fair to use 100% grading scale to evaluate SPED students, I’m trying to make a point here. Likewise, let’s just presume that all of the above students are dyslexic and that that there are two forms of dyslexia, dyslexia 1, and dyslexia 2, which is twice a severe as dyslexia 1.
And then let’s also presume that with appropriate assistance, each student will gain equally. That means they’ll be a 10 point increase in the scores of a student with dyslexia one, and a 20 point increase in the scores of a student with dyslexia two.
Hence, we then get the following:
0% to 59% becomes 10% to 69% and 20% to 79%
60%, Ds, becomes either 70% or 80%
70%, Cs, becomes either 80% or 90%
80%, Bs, becomes either 90% or 100%
90%, As, becomes either 100% or 110%
And the latter scores indicate the child’s actual potential. ADHD gets really interesting because you see children predominantly testing at the genius level, I’ve single scores in the 160s, and the caveat is that if a child answers all the questions what time remaining, you don’t know how much higher the score would be if there had been more questions.
There are a lot of B & C students who could be getting A’s and would be if they had just a little bit of help. These are kids with the potential to become the workforce that the state needs. Even in the trades, the days of tuning a car by ear and setting the gap of points with a dollar bill are long gone, you gotta understand computer trouble codes now.
BUT ALMOST ALL OF OUR SPED RESOURCES GO TO CHILDREN IN THE 0% TO 59% GROUP. Children in the higher levels can “get by“ and hence are ignored and psychologically beaten into submission.