New York City to screen all students for dyslexia, with specialized instruction starting in the fall

By Marcia Kramer

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    NEW YORK (WCBS) — New York City is embarking on a landmark program to assess all public school students for dyslexia and provide targeted, specialized instruction to help them reach their full potential.

It’s the largest, most comprehensive program in the nation and will help students whose parents lack the financial ability to send their kids to special private schools.

Mayor Eric Adams is dyslexic but says his learning problems weren’t diagnosed until he was in college. It has long been his dream to help kids, especially kids form poor neighborhoods, get the help he was denied.

Now, he’s made that dream come true — not only for himself, but for parents who have struggled to help their kids learn and succeed, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported.

“For the past 16 years, I know all too well the pain of trying to advocate to support my children to read,” said Naomi Pena, who has four children with dyslexia.

Pena was brought to tears as she tried to explain the importance of what the city’s new program will mean for her and other parents of kids who have struggled to read.

“We have all experienced firsthand the deep pain of watching our children suffer. We know how difficult it is to get desperately needed services for our children, and we understand the barriers that prevent so many families from getting the support and the instruction they need so their children can learn to read,” she said.

“Dyslexia is not a disadvantage. It’s just a different way of learning. And all the children need, they need the tools to know how to understand how they comprehend information,” Adams added.

For the first time, New York City public school students will be screened for dyslexia — every zip code, free of charge.

In the fall, specialized pilot programs to teach dyslexic students will open at P.S. 125 in Harlem and P.S. 161 in the Bronx. By fall 2023, there will be schools in all five boroughs offering programs for students with language disabilities.

Then by April 2023, all teachers in grades K-12 will get training in how to teach students with learning disabilities.

Schools Chancellor David Banks said the failure to screen for dyslexia may be why many minority students fail.

“When the mayor talks about 65% of Black and brown children who never achieve proficiency in reading, it’s not because our teachers don’t care. Our approach has been a flawed approach,” he said.

CBS2’s Political Reporter Marcia Kramer asked the mayor if he ever thinks about how his life would have been different if he had access to these programs when he was a child.

“I think that if I would have had that support earlier, right now you would not be saying just ‘Mr. Mayor,’ you’d probably be saying, ‘Mr. President,'” Adams replied.

The mayor believes in the program so much, he says he’s going to start screening people in city jails for dyslexia, and he wants to work with state lawmakers, like Brooklyn Assemblyman Robert Carroll, who is also dyslexic, to develop screening programs at state prisons.

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