How American schools fail kids with dyslexia

Emily Hanford:

Dayne Guest graduated from high school in 2016. He had been working construction but quit, knowing that wasn’t what he wanted do with his life. Today Guest’s options are limited because he struggles to read. When he opens a book, he sees “just a whole bunch of words, a whole bunch of letters lined up.”

His mom, Pam Guest, knew something wasn’t right when Dayne was in kindergarten. “In the mornings when students came into the classroom, they would write that they’d brought their lunch or that they were going to purchase lunch in the cafeteria,” she said. “And Dayne always walked right past that board and sat down.”

Teachers said Dayne would catch up, but by the end of first grade, he still wasn’t reading.

Pam thought her son might have dyslexia. But the teachers said no. It went on like this for years: Pam suspecting Dayne was dyslexic, the schools saying no, and Pam believing them because they were the education experts.