Georgia teen with dyslexia gets education assistance, thanks to SPLC lawsuit

Trinity is a lot like most 16-year-old girls. The rising high school sophomore speed-texts with her friends about everything and nothing and looks forward to the day when she can drive a car. When she is old enough, she wants to be an esthetician.

What Trinity has never confided in most of her close friends is that she struggles to read or write those texts herself because of her untreated dyslexia. Her school district in the Atlanta metro area ignored her learning disability and promoted her from grade to grade – even to high school when she could only read at a first-grade level. She became clever about concealing her disability, either using her phone’s dictation function to send texts or handing her phone to friends and running off, telling them, “I’m too busy. You write back for me.”

“I didn’t want anyone to know and spread rumors about me,” Trinity said. “I felt like I couldn’t trust people. I was scared what they would think of me.”

Now, because of a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center that was settled in May, she will finally get the education services to which she is entitled under federal law. The DeKalb County School District agreed to pay $49,000 for intensive, one-on-one instruction by a specially trained tutor using proven methods developed for students with dyslexia.

“The district took no responsibility for its failure to educate Trinity,” said Eugene Choi, a senior staff attorney with the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team. “From her early school years on, when Trinity’s mother expressed concerns about possible dyslexia, she received misplaced blame for Trinity’s reading struggles, instead of the evaluation and interventions she needed. Instead of supporting Trinity’s learning, the district blamed her for having a disability – wasting time, energy and resources defending its discriminatory practices.

“Students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities should not need lawyers to learn to read. When Trinity and her family refused to accept anything less than justice, the district finally agreed to settle her case.”

‘Something was wrong’

Throughout her schooling, Trinity demonstrated signs of dyslexia – a neurological, language-based learning disability. It is the most common learning disability, affecting 10% to 20% of the U.S. population.

In the first grade, she floundered when most of her peers were learning to read.

“I knew being around other kids that she wasn’t where she should be,” said Trinity’s mother, Sendy Jackson. “I let her teacher know that something was wrong.”

The teacher assured her that Trinity would improve in reading and in math and advised Jackson to work with her daughter at home. By the second grade, Trinity showed telltale signs of dyslexia. She struggled to read without pictures, to learn the names and sounds of letters, to spell and to separate words into sounds and to write. She also struggled with math, which requires reading and calculating numbers.

“The teacher told me that she couldn’t stop in the middle of the lesson to give Trinity individual help,” Jackson said. “She said she would give Trinity an extra sheet of homework that I could help her with, throwing it back to me.”

Trinity’s school first referred her for a psychological evaluation in the second grade to see if she would qualify for special education services, but the evaluation never happened – nor did the school disclose the referral to her parents.

By the end of second grade, Trinity was falling further behind, yet the school designated her for promotion. Trinity’s parents moved her to private school to repeat the second grade. After Trinity showed no improvement in the third grade, her parents returned her to public school.

In the fifth grade, before Trinity was promoted to middle school, her mother learned that she could formally request an evaluation of her daughter and did so. Yet it took three more years for the district to commission the evaluation. Under law, the evaluation should have been conducted within 60 days of Jackson’s request.

“In fourth or fifth grade, when we started doing multiplication and reading development and anything new, it would take me a lot longer than the other kids,” Trinity said.

Eventually, she became anxious and depressed, as noted in her progress reports.

Toward the end of the fifth grade, before the transition to middle school, the school gave Jackson the opportunity to apply for a 504 Plan, which provides qualifying students with special accommodations or modifications, such as extra time to complete work and tests. But Trinity didn’t receive a 504 Plan until the seventh grade.

Trinity was in the ninth grade in November 2023 when the SPLC filed the lawsuit on her behalf, alleging violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) by denying her a free appropriate public education.

Vast implications

Aside from the increasing personal toll on Trinity, the social implications of illiteracy and low literacy are vast. Across the country, Black children in particular are frequently denied remedial instruction in reading and math. Systemic discrimination in school results in fewer Black children than white being identified early, if at all, for dyslexia, despite federal mandates that school districts identify students with learning disabilities.

In Georgia, about 80% of the state’s Black students are below proficient levels in reading, and 52% are below even basic levels, according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Latinx students score slightly above those rates.

“Multiply Trinity by thousands and you get the number of children with disabilities who are falling through the cracks every year, not just in DeKalb County but across the state,” Choi said.

Children who cannot read by the third grade – when children “read to learn” as opposed to “learn to read” – are unlikely to catch up, according to children’s rights attorney Randee Waldman, director of the Barton Juvenile Defender Clinic at Emory University School of Law.

Seventy-five percent of third graders with poor reading skills remain poor readers in high school, with economically disadvantaged Black and Latinx children dropping out at significantly higher rates than white students and higher than children of color who are not economically disadvantaged.

Students with dyslexia often find ways to mask their reading challenges by remaining quiet or clowning around to draw attention away from their disability.

“No one wants to call attention to themselves because they can’t read,” Waldman said.

They may also commit an offense in school due to boredom, frustration and anger. Suspensions are common, and students may be sent to alternative schools, or worse, end up in jail. Eighty-five percent of all children in the juvenile court system are functionally low literate.

Even if students evade the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, those 25 and older without a high school degree have the lowest earnings and highest unemployment rate in the U.S. They are less likely to vote, more vulnerable to online radicalization and often continue a multigenerational lineage of illiteracy and poverty.

“Hiding one’s inability to read becomes harder in high school when students must attain a certain number of credits to pass,” said Waldman, who has represented dozens of DeKalb County students with reading disabilities since 2006, often after they have been arrested. “That’s why we have to identify poor readers in first grade, to solve the problem before it gets out of control.”

Teachers lack special training

In 2019, the Georgia Legislature passed SB 48, requiring the Georgia Department of Education to conduct a three-year pilot program to develop policies to screen students for dyslexia and provide unspecified supplemental training for teachers.

DeKalb County was one of seven participating districts in the pilot that ended in 2023. The program’s final annual report identified challenges to dyslexia remediation in the districts, such as persuading “school and district leaders to understand the need to make changes to reading instruction and buy in to those changes, especially early” and the need to “make sure teachers did not see training as a punishment.”

Under SB 48, Georgia school districts will start screening all kindergartners for characteristics of dyslexia during the 2024-25 school year. Students in first through third grades will also be tested if they have already been identified as needing supplemental instruction.

Since SB 48 was passed – and as the DeKalb school district continues to pay legal bills to defend itself from lawsuits over IDEA violations – the district has not required professional teacher training in dyslexia, though some teachers have taken training on their own. Montgomery Elementary School in Brookhaven is in the process of training all teachers in a comprehensive approach for students with dyslexia, and nearby Marietta City Schools and Fulton County are training teachers in an intensive reading program known as LETRS. The program helps teachers notice the signs of dyslexia and other reading challenges and provide targeted instruction and remediation to meet students’ needs.

This means that unless the DeKalb school district trains all teachers to become literacy professionals, help for dyslexic students will remain hit or miss.

“Education for Black children has always been separate and unequal,” said Sherri Lucas-Hall, a longtime Georgia educator and tutor trained in LETRS.

“Expectations by white educators have always been lower for Black children than white. And a lot of Black and Latinx children are diagnosed with ADHD and medicated when no one identifies the real problem as dyslexia. Also, when there is generational dyslexia, parents will say, ‘We all have trouble reading in my family, so my kid does,’ and don’t see that their children have a problem that can be corrected.”

Before the SPLC lawsuit, Lucas-Hall attended a meeting aimed at developing an Individualized Education Program (IEP), a requirement under IDEA, for Trinity.

At the meeting, no one from the district was knowledgeable about dyslexia or had even reviewed her records, because they couldn’t find them. Nor did they know how best to provide her with an IEP. Rather, the district proposed she take the same reading program as every other high school student.

Lucas-Hall wondered to herself, “‘Why did you wait till ninth grade to address her reading disability?’ I felt the district was unaware, but because of my experience with DeKalb, I already knew that. They had a wait-and-see attitude. They had no knowledge of dyslexia and what it looks like in a student, because I had seen that in the classroom.”

A new world

The prospect of learning to read better gives Trinity hope.

“Before, when I had to read in front of the class, everyone tried to correct me,” Trinity said. “They’d say, ‘Why is she acting like she can’t read or spell.’ And when we had to write an answer to a question about a paragraph of a famous book, I wouldn’t let anyone see my paper. I’d ask someone near me how to spell words, or I’d lie and say, ‘I’m not done yet,’ because I didn’t know how to spell.

“Now that I’m getting help, I feel like a lot of my problems will be solved in the education world and in real world,” she said. “When I’ll be in a restaurant and the lady asks me what I want from the menu, I’ll be able to pronounce the words right, and I won’t be stressed.”

Illustration at top: The social implications of illiteracy and low literacy are vast, and children who cannot read by the third grade are unlikely to catch up. (Credit: SPLC)