When Teresa Maldonado first noticed that her daughter was having trouble reading in first grade, her concerns were dismissed by teachers at a Catholic school in San Antonio.
“Her teachers would tell me she knows how to read, but I knew she was really memorizing all the books,” she said during a State Board of Education hearing last week.
Maldonado testified her daughter’s difficulties were attributed to the dual language nature of the education. But the real culprit was a combination of dysgraphia and dyslexia, two common learning differences that advocates say are under-diagnosed and unsupported in the current school system. Dysgraphia is a learning disability that impacts writing, while dyslexia impacts the ability to read.
Her child’s experience is what brought Maldonado to Austin on June 21 to testify in support of Celebrate Dyslexia, a new charter school created by a nonprofit with the same name, that plans to both serve students with dyslexia and help teachers learn how to better serve students with the learning difference.
Board members approved the charter, 13-1, days later, and school leaders will spend the next year planning before opening in the 2024-2025 school year. The school will start its first year at the DoSeum as an incubator, and will move into a permanent location later on.
Maldonado’s daughter has since moved to a public dual language school, where she has been able to receive specialized support and recently passed her STAAR exams.
Jasmin Dean, the founder of the nonprofit and board chair of the school, said experiences like Maldonado’s are not unique.
“A lot of times [dual language students] are misidentified because parents will be told ‘Oh, it’s a language issue,’ where it is dyslexia and need intervention supports,” said Dean who has dyslexia herself and also has three sons with dyslexia.
The new school will be prepared for this, she said, with bilingual dyslexia therapists.
“There is Spanish language intervention, so our students on our campus can have the best possible language acquisition in English and in Spanish for those that are emergent bilinguals,” she said.
Dean said many parents like Maldonado reached out to her in the years since she started the nonprofit in 2019 to elevate and provide resources and training related to dyslexia, asking her to create a school. The nonprofit initially applied for a charter last year but was unsuccessful.
A lack of therapists
A similar challenge to Maldonado faced Flor Gutiérrez, the inaugural superintendent of the new charter school, who was a dual language teacher when her daughter, Galilea Garza, was in kindergarten five years ago.
When she noticed that her daughter wasn’t reading at the same level as her peers in kindergarten, she was concerned.
Gutiérrez was able to see that Galilea’s struggles were more severe than those faced by a child first learning to read, but she wasn’t able to pin down why, and the school wasn’t able to help either.
“I started looking for solutions outside of school,” she said.
Galilea was later diagnosed with dyslexia by a private company outside of school.
But finding therapy to help her daughter was also difficult, she said, with only about 27 certified academic language therapists in the city at the time. So she decided to become one herself in order to ensure her daughter had the support she needed.
She then went on to get a master’s degree in special education with an educational diagnostician certificate and served as a dyslexia facilitator in the South San Antonio Independent School District.
In a full-circle moment, Galilea read from a prepared speech last week at the same meeting as Maldonado, advocating for a school to be opened to help struggling readers like she used to be.
A different type of classroom
While there is a dearth of therapists in schools, Celebrate Dyslexia will have one in every classroom, Gutiérrez said.
Also, unlike the therapy at most schools that takes a student out of another class, or in place of an elective, dyslexia therapy will be embedded during the school day.
“Our teachers will be CALTS [Certified Academic Language Therapists] and they will deliver instruction in all content areas through the lens of a therapist,” she said.
Since the school is an open enrollment charter, as required by state law, the district will also be open to students that don’t have dyslexia. They will also receive support to level up in their reading skills.
“The analogy that I can give is, there is no such thing as being too good of a swimmer. You can always become a stronger swimmer,” Dean said. “The same thing is true for reading. If you don’t have dyslexia and you are reading on grade level, we are going to really emphasize orthography and morphology of language.”
Orthography is studying the letters in read or written words, while morphology is studying the relationships between base words and their affixed forms like prefixes and suffixes in both heard/spoken and read/written words.
However, the district is targeting students who would most benefit from the school with its name and advertising.
Since dyslexia screening is required in Texas at the end of kindergarten and the beginning of first grade, parents often are able to identify learning problems early.
As a result, the school will start enrolling students in the second grade, and add students every year until sixth grade.
“We felt like if we could start in second grade, then we would have almost two full years before they take their first state assessment, hopefully leading to success on that assessment instead of starting in fourth grade, after they’ve already experienced a failure,” Dean said.
‘Fixing the groundwater’
While Celebrate Dyslexia’s inaugural class will consist of 112 students, the goal of the charter school is to change the understanding and handling of dyslexia in schools across the entire region.
As many as one in five students have dyslexia, but only 4.5% of students in Education Service Center Region 20, which includes San Antonio, have been diagnosed officially with the condition, according to the charter application submitted to the Texas Education Agency.
The vast number of students falling through the cracks could account in part for the dismal reading scores across San Antonio, with less than half of students scoring at or above grade level for the 2021-2022 academic year in Grades 3-8.
“We’re working on an … opportunity for teachers to get this academic language therapy training that is so important right now, in order to learn how to teach reading, especially for dyslexic students,” Dean said.
That effort includes working with UTSA, which will be collaborating with the school to help the next generation of teachers learn how to better monitor for the signs of dyslexia and serve students who are diagnosed with it.
“We’re really proud to be working with UTSA in the space to affect the groundwater, and not just feed fish,” she said. “We have to make sure that all of our teachers feel readily equipped to be able to do this.”
Central to that collaboration is Claudia Treviño García, a UTSA associate professor in the bicultural-bilingual studies department. She also struggled through finding support for her son, who has dyslexia.
“Our current teachers do not have … the preparation necessary to meet the needs of dyslexic children,” she said. “They do not have the professional development or certification that is necessary to know the specific strategies and approaches to teach children with dyslexia.”
García said she bounced back and forth between a Catholic school, where he started, and a public school district before ending up at a charter school that had the needed support.
He is now a junior at UTSA and a Marine veteran.
But not a lot has changed over the years, García said, making a collaboration to move the needle on preparation necessary.
“UTSA is committed to making sure that we’re developing future educators that are going to understand how to support dyslexic students out in the community,” she said. “Because UTSA is an Hispanic-serving institution, and we are very much community based.”
García is hoping to use her experience to help other parents in the San Antonio community.
“It is important to not have another parent go through what my husband and I had to go through with our son,” she said. “Because it really impacts their self-esteem. And, especially men with dyslexia, go straight to the pipeline to prison.”
That was echoed by real estate developer and civic leader Marty Wender, who has been outspoken about growing up with dyslexia.
Wender said there was a pivotal moment in his childhood when he was struggling to read and became convinced that he was dumb.
“My mother, who is an educator, would not let me believe I was dumb,” he said, adding that he has been able to compensate for his lack of reading abilities with other strengths throughout his successful career.
“God knows what would have happened to me if she didn’t say that,” he said.
Wender, who is an at-large trustee on the nonprofit’s board, said the school is just the beginning of turning the tide on dyslexia in San Antonio.
“The charter school is a small step,” he said. “I don’t know if [Dean] realizes where she’s gonna end up, because I do. I’ve been around a lot longer than she has, and one of the things I can do is I have the ability to recognize a winner. And she’s a winner.”
