Monday, January 31, 2005

Guest Opinion: TUSD could save $40K just by talking to parents

JILL BLONDIN

Tucson Citizen

Public school officials can't seem to figure out why parents have yanked 8,300 kids out of the Tucson Unified School District, opting instead for quasi-public charter schools. So they plan to spend $40,000 on a study to get answers parent could provide for free.

Waste is one thing, but the goal of luring students back for financial reasons gets to the root of the district's problem: TUSD has grown into a huge, inflexible bureaucracy that seems more concerned with preserving itself than educating children.

Sure, the majority of kids who fit the mold will graduate from public schools. But countless others don't get what they need at TUSD. My daughter is one of them. She started the new year at a new private school, but she is a perfect example of why more and more parents are opting for charter schools.

The story of how TUSD failed my daughter began six years ago, when I enrolled Kylie in a West Side elementary school. She was one of the youngest kids in her class, so I fully expected she might need to repeat kindergarten.

As the year wore on, the teacher told me she suspected Kylie was dyslexic. Most kids write some of their letters backwards and jumble the order of things as they're learning to read and write. But those possible signs of dyslexia were extreme in Kylie's work.

I was told she was too young to be reliably tested, but the school still evaluated her and recommended she be advanced to first-grade in special education. I declined, after being told another year of development might correct the anomalies.

I'm sure I'm not the first parent to question the wisdom of putting a child of otherwise normal intelligence in special ed, along with kids experiencing a wide range of sometimes severe problems.

Dyslexics are visual thinkers who have trouble reading because the words on a page essentially appear to be dancing around in three-dimensional fashion. It has nothing to do with their level of intelligence, which can range from genius to double digits. Albert Einstein was dyslexic, which makes one wonder what might have become of his brain if placed in the care of TUSD.

I don't mean to pick on TUSD. Most of its educators are caring and competent but hamstrung by adverse bureaucratic, financial and political realities. And most of the nation's public schools did pretty much the same back then: Dump kids with severe dyslexia in special ed, and leave the rest struggling in regular classrooms.

That situation changed about five years ago with new legislation. Now most special education students stay in regular classrooms but are pulled out periodically to work with special education teachers. Unfortunately, the stigma remains. These kids are still ridiculed, which is why so many parents resist the special-ed label. Even worse, many kids with mild dyslexia and other learning disabilities get no help at all when it's desperately needed.

After I enrolled Kylie for another year of kindergarten at a Catholic school, I alerted the teacher to her history and asked if she saw any signs Kylie might be dyslexic. I was told her only problem was being lazy, a trait commonly ascribed to dyslexics by people who are ignorant about the condition.

Kylie's first- and second-grade teachers told me she was progressing normally. I don't fault them. I thank them for keeping her up to speed as well as they did for as long as they did.

It wasn't until Kylie entered fourth grade this year that her average grades began to plummet. Without knowing Kylie's history at TUSD, her teacher summoned me a week after school started to tell me she suspected Kylie was dyslexic.

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