‘Nobody was trying to figure out what was wrong.’ How FWISD missed one teen’s diagnosis
When Andrew James was in elementary school, he’d sit at his desk, stare at what his teacher had written on the board and feel lost.
Sometimes he could almost make sense of what the teacher was writing, but not quite, he said. It was like it was written in a language that he didn’t understand.
Andrew was, and still is, a creative student. But when it came time for reading, he’d get frustrated and shut down. He’d cross his arms and refuse to participate, said his mom, Caroline James.
His teachers got frustrated, too.
“I would get notes about my kid, saying, ‘He’s not trying, he’s not giving us his best, he’s being defiant,’” Caroline said. “Well, he wasn’t being defiant. He didn’t know how to read.”
What Caroline and Andrew’s dad know now is that Andrew has dyslexia. Caroline, a former assistant principal in the Fort Worth Independent School District, said she worries about the number of kids who are in the same position Andrew was. The district isn’t doing a good enough job screening students for dyslexia and connecting those who have the condition with services, she said. Without specialized support, those students are often left to languish.
Majority of Fort Worth students struggle in reading
State test scores suggest the majority of public school students in Fort Worth struggle in reading. Just 43% of students across all public school campuses in the city limits scored on grade level in reading on last year’s STAAR exam, according to an analysis of state test data released in August by the Fort Worth Education Partnership. That figure includes campuses in 12 independent school districts, as well as public charter schools.
In Fort Worth ISD, the city’s largest school district, the picture is even bleaker. Just 31% of students scored on grade level in reading on last year’s state test, a number that has barely budged in at least a decade. The district’s lack of progress in reading was one factor that led to Superintendent Angélica Ramsey’s resignation in October.
Since then, the district’s board has made a priority of improving reading scores. At its December meeting, the board approved a resolution directing Interim Superintendent Karen Molinar to create a detailed plan to bring all students up to grade level in reading. During the same meeting, Molinar outlined a plan to re-engage businesses, religious organizations and other community partners around the issue of literacy.
Dyslexia creates roadblocks in the classroom
Dyslexia is a cognitive disability that causes children to struggle to read and write fluently. People with dyslexia have trouble connecting the sounds in spoken language with combinations of letters that make up words. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, people with dyslexia don’t see words or letters backwards.
Andrew could tell early on that there was something wrong with his reading. Often, when he got homework assignments in class, he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do until he got home and asked his parents to read the handout for him, he said. This would sometimes lead to arguments with his mom and dad, who didn’t yet understand why he was struggling to read.
Once, when Andrew was in first grade at Westcliff Elementary School, he brought home a test he’d failed. Caroline knew he understood the information the test covered, so she asked the teacher to give him the test again — orally this time, instead of in writing. After giving Andrew the exam again, the teacher told Caroline that he knew the material. But the teacher said she couldn’t count an exam given orally.
Caroline started to suspect that something deeper was causing Andrew’s problems in reading when he was in third grade. He’d been tested the previous year and was found not to have dyslexia, but he still wasn’t making progress. So his parents asked for another test. This time, Andrew was diagnosed with a specific learning disability in reading.
Under federal law, once a student is diagnosed with a specific learning disability, districts are required to offer them special education services. In Andrew’s case, that meant spending part of the day in a resource room, where he worked with a special education teacher who gave him more individualized attention than he got in a general classroom. But he still didn’t seem to be gaining any ground, Caroline said.
The following year, teachers gave Andrew another assessment, and this time determined that he was autistic, not dyslexic. Research indicates that neurodivergent people — those who have a neurodevelopmental difference like autism or ADHD — can also have dyslexia. But Fort Worth ISD dropped Andrew’s specific learning disability, meaning he no longer received the pull-out services he’d been getting.
Caroline was furious. She felt like the district was content to sideline her son and put his future in jeopardy rather than look for a solution.
Key School offers fresh start, language therapy
By the time Andrew was in fifth grade, he hated school, Caroline said. Trying to get him ready for school every day was a fight, she said, and he got emotional anytime he had reading or writing assignments — something that became even more common as he reached upper elementary school and his teachers began incorporating more reading and writing into other subject areas.
In 2020, when Andrew was getting ready to start sixth grade, Caroline met with his teacher to talk about a plan for the upcoming school year. She walked away from the meeting feeling frustrated. Nothing in the plan was different from what his teachers had tried for years.
So Caroline withdrew Andrew from Fort Worth ISD and transferred him to Key School and Training Center, a private school that specializes in working with students with dyslexia and other disabilities like ADHD and autism. When they got there, Caroline gave the results of Andrew’s assessment from Fort Worth ISD to the diagnostician at Key School. Right away, the diagnostician suspected he had dyslexia.
Caroline walked out of the diagnostician’s office to tell her son the news. She expected it to be a major revelation. But it was no surprise to Andrew.
“Well, duh, Mom. I can’t read,” he said, flatly.
“I cried. I felt so bad,” she said. “I failed my kid, and I should know better. I absolutely should know better, I’m a teacher.”
Among the other services Andrew gets at Key School is one-on-one help from an academic language therapist. That’s a type of therapy designed to help students with dyslexia and other reading disorders understand the building blocks of reading and develop strategies for overcoming the challenges associated with their diagnoses. Four years later, Andrew is reading on grade level and plans to go to college once he graduates high school, Caroline said.
Caroline also followed Andrew to Key School. After enrolling her son at the school, she left Fort Worth ISD and took a job as the school’s director of enrollment.
With the benefit of hindsight, Caroline can see why Andrew struggled, and why the solutions Fort Worth ISD tried didn’t help. Written text is a type of code, and fluent readers can use that code to unlock words, sentences and paragraphs. But for people like Andrew, being confronted with a block of text is like trying to read a code without any way of breaking it, Caroline said.
That means Andrew needs specialized support to help him understand how combinations of letters go together to make up words. That’s a fundamentally different kind of support from what students with intellectual disabilities need, and one that most special education teachers aren’t trained to provide.
“He has to be taught the rules very explicitly,” Caroline said. “So as soon as you teach him the rules about the English language, he’s on board and he’s ready to go, but you can’t just plow forward without teaching him the rules.”
Reading disorders can derail high school graduation plans
Research suggests that students with learning difficulties like dyslexia are far less likely than their peers to graduate from high school. In 2022, students with disabilities were about twice as likely to drop out of high school as those without disabilities, according to figures from the National Center for Education Statistics. People with dyslexia also make up an outsized share of the nation’s prison population: A 2000 study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that nearly half of the state’s prison inmates were likely dyslexic.
That doesn’t mean students with dyslexia have no chance to succeed. Dyslexia advocates often point to Albert Einstein, Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg as examples of people who overcame dyslexia and went on to do great things. Advocates say that people with dyslexia tend to be good problem solvers and adept at three-dimensional thinking.
Early screening is one of the keys to helping students with dyslexia develop reading skills, said Nathan Clemens, a professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. The earlier teachers identify kids with dyslexia and get them extra support, the better their chances of helping them make substantial progress in reading, he said.
That isn’t to say that there’s no hope in cases where a student isn’t identified as having dyslexia until later, Clemens said — extra support can help kids with dyslexia at any grade level. But early diagnosis gives students the best chances for rapid growth, he said.
Identifying kids with dyslexia early also gives school leaders the chance to intervene before it affects their educational trajectory too dramatically, Clemens said. For students with dyslexia, reading is a laborious task, and often filled with errors, he said. That becomes more of a problem for them as they get older and they’re expected to learn by reading. If students struggle to read text accurately, they won’t be able to get as much out of what they’re reading, which means they won’t learn all the material they should, he said. That puts them at greater risk of dropping out of high school and limits their opportunities for college and a career, he said.
Although early identification is key for students who have dyslexia, Clemens said, not every student who gets flagged in a screening in kindergarten or first grade will end up needing special services. That’s because the hallmark of dyslexia is reading words inaccurately and inefficiently. There’s no real expectation that kindergartners and first-graders — even those without dyslexia or some other disability — should be able to read well.
But those early-grade screenings can give teachers a warning that students may be at risk for dyslexia or other reading difficulties later on, Clemens said. Knowing that, teachers can keep an eye on those students’ progress. If they continue to struggle in later grades, teachers can give them a more definitive diagnostic test and, if necessary, connect them with specialized support, he said.
Texas law requires schools to screen for dyslexia
A 2017 state law requires school districts in Texas to screen all students for dyslexia in kindergarten and again before Jan. 31 of their first grade year. When a student is identified as potentially being at risk for dyslexia, districts can begin gathering more information on how the student is doing to see whether they’re truly at risk. If that student goes on to struggle in reading later on, districts can give them a more formal evaluation and offer them special education services if they’re diagnosed with dyslexia or some other learning disability.
There are several reasons why a district might not screen a student for dyslexia in kindergarten or first grade. A student could withdraw from the district before their school conducts its screenings, or transfer into the district after screenings are already over. School leaders could decide that screening is inappropriate based on a student’s individualized education plan. Those circumstances wouldn’t place the district out of compliance with state law.
But if a district fails to screen a student because of some technical problem, or if the student was absent on the day of the screening and the district doesn’t offer a makeup, the district falls out of compliance with the law. According to district numbers reported to the Texas Education Agency, Fort Worth ISD was out of compliance in 49 cases in the 2023-24 school year, representing about 3% of the students it was required to screen.
In Fort Worth ISD, 4,082 students have been identified as having dyslexia, or about 5.7% of the district’s total enrollment. That places the district in line with the rest of the state. In society at large, an estimated 20% of people have dyslexia, making it the most common neuro-cognitive disorder, according to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.
Marie Mechinus, director of educational content and publishing with the International Dyslexia Association, said one reason for that difference in identification rates could be the fact that a large percentage of public school students are too young to be expected to read.
For example, the 5.7% of students who have been identified in Fort Worth ISD wouldn’t include students who will go on to show symptoms of dyslexia later on, but can’t be identified yet because they’re in kindergarten or pre-K. Struggling readers as old as second grade might not be identified as having dyslexia because they’re still too young for those challenges to raise any alarm bells with teachers and parents, said Mechinus, who is also a certified academic language therapist.
Audrey Thomas, Fort Worth ISD’s executive director of specialized learning, said a number of other factors could contribute to the gap between the 5.7% of students identified as having dyslexia and the one in five people who are estimated to have the disorder across the country. Like other disorders such as autism and ADHD, dyslexia occurs along a spectrum. Students who have mild cases may not be identified in screenings, Thomas said, but they’re also less likely to need specialized support than other students with more severe cases.
Furthermore, those screenings don’t represent dyslexic students’ only chance of being diagnosed, Thomas said. Screenings only represent a single data point among many. If a student struggles with reading later on and a teacher suspects dyslexia might be the cause, the school can still give the student an evaluation, whether a previous screener identified them as being at risk for dyslexia or not, she said.
If a parent suspects a learning disability is keeping their child from making progress in reading, their first course of action should be to talk to their child’s teacher, Thomas said. If the student has already been diagnosed with a disability and has an individualized education plan, parents can call a meeting of the committee that oversees that plan and monitors the student’s progress. Such committees are made up of the student’s parents, teachers and other school representatives. That committee can look at the student’s performance and decide whether to make changes to the school’s instructional strategy for that student.
But Caroline, Andrew’s mom, said such conversations with his teachers at Westcliff went nowhere. Only one of his teachers there seemed to be trying to form a connection with him, she said. Others just belittled him in front of his classmates.
“Nobody was trying to figure out what was wrong,” she said. “They were just beating him up over it.”
Moving past frustration and heartache
Andrew, now in 10th grade, still gets angry when he thinks about how his early-grade teachers handled his learning disability. He doesn’t understand why no one noticed what was going on until years later. If they had, he suspects he’d be able to read more easily today, and he would have been spared a lot of frustration and heartache along the way.
Caroline is looking for ways to spare other kids that same frustration. She’s talking with the Sid Richardson Foundation and the Fort Worth Parks and Recreation Department about a plan to hold dyslexia screenings at community centers and libraries next summer.
Andrew said he still hasn’t mastered reading. But with the strategies he’s learned at his new school, it comes more easily than it did when he was younger.
The difference in how Andrew carries himself now is noticeable, Caroline said. He walks a little taller. He smiles more at school. When he gets home in the afternoon, he goes into his bedroom and does his homework without needing to ask for help.
One day last spring, during their drive home from school, Caroline reminded Andrew that his 16th birthday was just a few weeks away. Knowing that many teenagers have big expectations for that milestone birthday, Caroline asked whether he knew what he wanted.
Andrew already had something in mind. He asked for books.
This story was originally published January 16, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
