Trinity is a lot like most 16-year-old girls. The rising high school sophomore speed-texts with her friends about everything and nothing and looks forward to the day when she can drive a car. When she is old enough, she wants to be an esthetician.
However, beneath this relatable exterior lies a significant struggle that Trinity has never confided in most of her close friends: she battles with reading and writing those texts because of her untreated dyslexia. Despite her challenges, her school district in the Atlanta metro area overlooked her learning disability, promoting her from grade to grade—even advancing her to high school—while she was only able to read at a first-grade level. In a world where communication is predominantly digital, Trinity became adept at masking her difficulties, using her phone’s dictation function to send messages or handing her device to friends with a hurried excuse, “I’m too busy. You write back for me.”
The weight of her secret has been a heavy burden.
“I didn’t want anyone to know and spread rumors about me,” Trinity said. “I felt like I couldn’t trust people. I was scared what they would think of me.”
After years of struggle, there is now a glimmer of hope for Trinity and other students like her. Thanks to a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), settled in May, she will finally get the education assistance she deserves under federal law. The DeKalb County School District has agreed to pay $49,000 for intensive, one-on-one instruction with a specially trained tutor using proven methods designed for students with dyslexia.
“The district took no responsibility for its failure to educate Trinity,” said Eugene Choi, a senior staff attorney with the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team. “From her early school years on, when Trinity’s mother expressed concerns about possible dyslexia, she received misplaced blame for Trinity’s reading struggles, instead of the evaluation and interventions she needed. Instead of supporting Trinity’s learning, the district blamed her for having a disability—wasting time, energy, and resources defending its discriminatory practices.
“Students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities should not need lawyers to learn to read. When Trinity and her family refused to accept anything less than justice, the district finally agreed to settle her case.”
Signs of Struggle
Throughout her educational journey, Trinity exhibited multiple signs of dyslexia, a neurological, language-based learning disability that affects 10% to 20% of the U.S. population. Despite her efforts, she floundered in first grade while her peers were mastering reading skills.
“I knew being around other kids that she wasn’t where she should be,” said Trinity’s mother, Sendy Jackson. “I let her teacher know that something was wrong.”
Initially, her teacher assured Jackson that Trinity would catch up in reading and math, suggesting that she work with her daughter at home. However, by second grade, the signs of dyslexia became glaringly apparent. Trinity struggled to read without pictures, had difficulty learning letter names and sounds, and faced challenges with spelling and writing. Even math became a struggle, as it requires both reading and calculating numbers.
“The teacher told me that she couldn’t stop in the middle of the lesson to give Trinity individual help,” Jackson recounted. “She said she would give Trinity an extra sheet of homework that I could help her with, throwing it back to me.”
The school first referred Trinity for a psychological evaluation in the second grade to assess her eligibility for special education services. Unfortunately, this evaluation never occurred, nor was the referral communicated to her parents.
As the school year progressed, Trinity continued to fall behind academically, yet she was still promoted to the next grade level. In a bid to find a more supportive environment, her parents moved her to a private school to repeat second grade. However, after showing no signs of improvement in the third grade, they returned her to public school.
By fifth grade, Jackson learned that she could formally request an evaluation for her daughter, and she did. However, it took an exasperating three additional years for the district to conduct the evaluation. Under federal law, this evaluation should have been completed within 60 days of Jackson’s request.
“In fourth or fifth grade, when we started doing multiplication and reading development and anything new, it would take me a lot longer than the other kids,” Trinity shared.
Trinity’s anxiety and depression intensified over time, as reflected in her progress reports. Toward the end of fifth grade, just before transitioning to middle school, the school offered Jackson the opportunity to apply for a 504 Plan. This plan provides qualifying students with accommodations, such as extended time on assignments and tests. However, Trinity did not receive a 504 Plan until the seventh grade.
In November 2023, when Trinity was in ninth grade, the SPLC filed a lawsuit on her behalf, alleging violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for denying her a free appropriate public education.
The Broader Implications
The impact of illiteracy extends far beyond Trinity’s individual struggles; it carries vast social implications as well. Nationwide, Black children are often denied access to necessary remedial instruction in reading and math. Systemic discrimination within school systems frequently results in fewer Black children being identified for dyslexia compared to their white counterparts, despite federal mandates requiring early identification of learning disabilities.
In Georgia, approximately 80% of Black students are below proficient reading levels, with 52% unable to reach even basic levels, according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Latinx students fare only slightly better.
“Multiply Trinity by thousands and you get the number of children with disabilities who are falling through the cracks every year, not just in DeKalb County but across the state,” Choi emphasized.
Research indicates that children who cannot read by the third grade—when they shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”—are unlikely to catch up. Randee Waldman, a children’s rights attorney and director of the Barton Juvenile Defender Clinic at Emory University School of Law, states that 75% of third graders with poor reading skills remain poor readers throughout high school. Economically disadvantaged Black and Latinx children experience significantly higher dropout rates than their white peers and even than their economically disadvantaged counterparts from other racial backgrounds.
As Trinity’s story illustrates, access to education and the necessary support can profoundly change a child’s trajectory. She represents the many children facing similar challenges who, with appropriate resources and advocacy, can overcome their learning disabilities and thrive academically. The ongoing fight for educational justice highlights the need for systemic change to ensure that all children receive the education assistance they need to succeed.
Students with dyslexia often find ways to mask their reading challenges. They may remain quiet or clown around in class to divert attention away from their disability, desperately trying to avoid any spotlight on their struggles.
“No one wants to call attention to themselves because they can’t read,” Waldman said. This reluctance to reveal their difficulties can lead to a variety of behavioral issues. Students may act out in frustration, boredom, or anger, committing offenses that can result in school suspensions. Unfortunately, this can lead to a pipeline that funnels them into alternative schools or, in the worst-case scenario, into the juvenile justice system. A staggering statistic reveals that eighty-five percent of all children in the juvenile court system are functionally low literate.
Even for those who manage to evade the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, the future can still be bleak. Individuals aged 25 and older without a high school diploma represent a demographic with the lowest earnings and the highest unemployment rates in the United States. This lack of education has broader implications, as these individuals are less likely to participate in the electoral process, more vulnerable to online radicalization, and often perpetuate a multigenerational cycle of illiteracy and poverty.
“Hiding one’s inability to read becomes harder in high school when students must attain a certain number of credits to pass,” said Waldman, who has represented dozens of DeKalb County students with reading disabilities since 2006, often after they have been arrested. “That’s why we have to identify poor readers in first grade, to solve the problem before it gets out of control.”
Teachers Lack Special Training
The struggle for students with dyslexia is compounded by a lack of trained educators. In 2019, the Georgia Legislature passed SB 48, which mandates the Georgia Department of Education to conduct a three-year pilot program aimed at developing policies to screen students for dyslexia. The legislation also called for unspecified supplemental training for teachers, recognizing that effective intervention begins with knowledgeable educators.
DeKalb County was one of seven districts participating in this pilot program, which concluded in 2023. The final annual report of the initiative pointed out several challenges related to dyslexia remediation, particularly the difficulty in persuading “school and district leaders to understand the need to make changes to reading instruction and buy in to those changes, especially early,” as well as the necessity to “make sure teachers did not see training as a punishment.” Without addressing these fundamental issues, the educational landscape for dyslexic students remains precarious.
Under SB 48, Georgia school districts are set to begin screening all kindergartners for signs of dyslexia during the 2024-25 school year. Students in first through third grades will also be evaluated if they have already been flagged as needing supplemental instruction. These early interventions are critical for setting students on the path to success.
Since the passage of SB 48, and while the DeKalb school district continues to deal with legal battles over IDEA violations, there has not been a systematic requirement for professional teacher training in dyslexia. While some educators have sought training independently, comprehensive initiatives remain sporadic. For instance, Montgomery Elementary School in Brookhaven is actively training all its teachers in a holistic approach for students with dyslexia. Nearby districts, such as Marietta City Schools and Fulton County, are implementing intensive reading programs like LETRS, designed to help educators identify the signs of dyslexia and other reading challenges while providing tailored instruction and remediation to meet students’ needs.
This variability in teacher training means that unless the DeKalb school district commits to training all its teachers to become literacy professionals, support for dyslexic students will remain inconsistent, leading to continued struggles in the classroom.
“Education for Black children has always been separate and unequal,” said Sherri Lucas-Hall, a longtime Georgia educator and tutor trained in LETRS. “Expectations by white educators have always been lower for Black children than white. A lot of Black and Latinx children are diagnosed with ADHD and medicated when no one identifies the real problem as dyslexia. Also, when there is generational dyslexia, parents will say, ‘We all have trouble reading in my family, so my kid does,’ and don’t see that their children have a problem that can be corrected.”
Before the SPLC lawsuit, Lucas-Hall attended a meeting aimed at developing an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for Trinity, a requirement under IDEA. At this meeting, no one from the district was knowledgeable about dyslexia or had even reviewed her records because they couldn’t find them. They were also unable to determine how best to provide her with an IEP. Instead, the district proposed that she participate in the same reading program as every other high school student.
Lucas-Hall questioned, “‘Why did you wait till ninth grade to address her reading disability?’ I felt the district was unaware, but because of my experience with DeKalb, I already knew that. They had a wait-and-see attitude. They had no knowledge of dyslexia and what it looks like in a student, because I had seen that in the classroom.”
A New World of Opportunities
Amid these challenges, the prospect of learning to read better gives Trinity hope. With the right support, she feels optimistic about her future.
“Before, when I had to read in front of the class, everyone tried to correct me,” Trinity said. “They’d say, ‘Why is she acting like she can’t read or spell?’ And when we had to write an answer to a question about a paragraph of a famous book, I wouldn’t let anyone see my paper. I’d ask someone near me how to spell words, or I’d lie and say, ‘I’m not done yet,’ because I didn’t know how to spell.
“Now that I’m getting help, I feel like a lot of my problems will be solved in the education world and in the real world,” she said. “When I’m in a restaurant and the lady asks me what I want from the menu, I’ll be able to pronounce the words right, and I won’t be stressed.”
As we recognize the challenges that students like Trinity face, it’s crucial to advocate for necessary resources and support systems that enable them to thrive. Parents and guardians should actively seek opportunities to get education assistance tailored to their children’s needs. By fostering an understanding of dyslexia and its impact, we can work towards a future where every child receives the support they deserve and can navigate their educational journey with confidence.
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