The Maine House and Senate will soon be voting on L.D. 231, “An Act To Ensure That Schoolchildren with Dyslexia Receive the Assistance Needed.” There have been two impassioned public hearings in front of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee on this topic so far this session.

The task of this piece of legislation is no less than changing our educational culture in this state and in the country as a whole.

The current thinking in our special education system is that “dyslexia” is an archaic term that refers to an oversimplified understanding of the complex realities of learning disabilities. Master’s-level special education teachers are trained in identifying and working with orthographic, lexicographic, phonemic and phonological processing delays. They don’t want to “burden” a child with any unnecessary labels.

But in this current culture, which ostensibly pairs such sensitivity with modern concepts of neurology in learning, the emperor is still standing there naked. Dyslexia is real, current and misunderstood. Families are vastly relieved to get the diagnosis.

Today’s presumptuous conceptualization of dyslexia by our education system is creating an unnecessary and egregious obstacle for families who are struggling with this solvable set of challenges.

It’s way beyond time to offer specific training to our education professionals in how their current approach is not only failing to remediate the predictable processing issues that afflict up to 20 percent of our students, but also could be inadvertently damaging children emotionally.

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Dyslexic children are often labeled “lazy” and “disruptive” and experience punitive consequences for feeling humiliation, shame, frustration and hopelessness in a classroom setting that is not sensitized to their experiences.

I beseech all citizens to contact your legislators to urge them to join the governor and the commissioner of education in enacting this legislation, which will better equip our educators for this challenge.

Holly Noonan

Camden


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