MANHATTAN, N.Y. — When Naomi Peña’s first-born child was having trouble reading 16 years ago, teachers at his public school chalked it up to behavior problems. 

“They were just labeling my kid as lazy,” said Peña, of Manhattan, whose four children were eventually diagnosed with dyslexia. “I was in a space of not knowing what this thing was.”

Then a young mother on a low civil servant salary with little knowledge of dyslexia, she struggled to get him a diagnosis, which can cost upwards of $10,000, and to lobby for access to targeted reading help tailored toward students with severe reading challenges.

Federal law requires public schools to give students with dyslexia targeted tutoring and extra time on tests. But to get those services, teachers and administrators have to identify and accept potential signs of dyslexia. Peña and other parents say they often need to secure a formal dyslexia diagnosis by a psychologist to ensure they get services or, if public schools aren’t helping, subsidies for private school tuition.

Around 40 states require schools to screen children for risk of dyslexia, according to the National Center on Improving Literacy, a consortium of researchers. But in New York State, finding out if a child is dyslexic is left to the initiative of individual schools and parents. 

New York, California and Illinois are among the few states that don’t require schools to routinely test children for potential indications of dyslexia, according to a list maintained by the National Center on Improving Literacy. Those states include the some of the largest school districts, with high percentages of non-white students.

All students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, for example, are tested for signs of significant reading difficulty and the district provides comprehensive psychoeducational evaluations for students who show signs of potential dyslexia at no cost to families, said district spokeswoman Ana Rhodes. 

Even in Chicago where the state doesn’t mandate testing students for signs of dyslexia, 93% of kindergarten through 2nd grade schools use data from an online reading instruction platform to identify those who show signs of dyslexia, according to Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman Sylvia Barragan. As in Miami, evaluations for students who show potential signs of dyslexia are free.  Read the full story