MORGANTOWN – October is Dyslexia Awareness Month and the Bonnie Bailey Dyslexia Awareness Foundation is aiming to offer education and resources for individuals and families dealing with dyslexia in the greater Morgantown area.
We talked with Jeff Bailey – the foundation was named for his late wife – about their journey with a son with dyslexia, and with foundation board members about their work and goals.
Trenton Bailey’s story
Jeff and Bonnie had Trenton Bailey in their mid-40s, he said. “My son was extremely bright. When he was holding my fingers when he was a little kid, he could do percentages in his head.”
But he had trouble reading. “I thought he was being a horse’s butt.” They were in North Carolina at the time and Trenton started acting up; they thought maybe it was ADHD – a common error though about 30% of children with dyslexia also have ADHD, according to the International Dyslexia Association.
They moved to Morgantown where he attended Cheat Lake Elementary. He had an extensive vocabulary but still struggled with reading, Jeff Bailey said. They had him tested and found he was dyslexic.
They were able to get him help through the Orton–Gillingham teaching approach designed to help struggling readers. It explicitly teaches the connections between letters and sounds, according to IDA. In third grade, Trenton learned how to read.
But moving into middle school, he struggled again. The school couldn’t accommodate him. In ninth grade he had four D’s and was ready to drop out of school.
Jeff Bailey talked with former Gov. Gaston Caperton, who is dyslexic, and with former state Sen. Brooks McCabe. Both recommended the Gow School in upstate New York. Begun in 1926, it was the nation’s first school for dyslexics. And it was pricey (tuition for boarding students this school year is $77,500).
It is highly regimented, Bailey said. “It’s like being in the Army only you’re wearing coat and tie.” It was all boys then but co-ed now. It was 2014 and Trenton was 15 when he entered Gow in the 10th grade.
The Baileys got to meet other families. “What you find out immediately is you’re not alone in this world.” Others had the same journeys, or worse. The school had at the time 150 students from 26 countries.
Trenton’s reading improved six grade levels in a year. In 2016, he graduated with honors and earned a perfect score on his ACT test. He loves reading and learning and now serves on the foundation board.
“To have your kid go from being so discouraged and so emotionally distraught is so elating,” Bailey said. “You can’t imagine the gratitude, and that’s what this is all about.”
The foundation
In 2019, Bonnie Bailey was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. That October, family friends Rachel and Todd Wood, who also have a child with dyslexia, established the foundation in her name. Bonnie passed away in April 2020.
The announcement, which ran in The Dominion Post in October 2019, said distributions from the fund will provide support for charitable causes to educate, advocate and increase general awareness of dyslexia.
Rachel Wood said at the time, “Students with dyslexia are intelligent and creative people who are judged because of their struggles with basic reading skills. When teachers are given the right resources, they can empower students with dyslexia to overcome their disability. Unfortunately, teachers are given a lot of misinformation and a lack of resources. We want to raise awareness and support students, parents and teachers in their efforts to provide the kind of instruction dyslexic students need to succeed.”
Jeff Bailey said kids with dyslexia who don’t receive help can be suicidal, disruptive, get picked on at school. And a lot of people suffer for it – the child, the parents, the teachers and more.
Dyslexia is hereditary and 20% of the population has it. Because kids struggle, and get labeled as lazy and stupid, according to IDA and other dyslexia resources, they can can feel like failures and even turn to crime: 50% of the prison population nationwide has dyslexia.
Bailey said, “Saving a kid’s life is so vital, you can’t measure that.” That’s why they want to work with the schools. “We need to get these people on board with us or us on board with them, because these kids cannot wait.”
Catching them early and getting them help requires far less resources and effort than waiting, he said. “It’s much cheaper to fix than the problem than it is to ignore it.” Testing and help can cost money, waiting costs more. “Yeah, it does when the wheels come off. … I find it paradoxical, in this enlightened society, that values education so much, this isn’t a standard part of their curriculum.”
But Bailey and the other board members aren’t criticizing the schools. “None of us want to be in an adversarial relationship with the public school system.”
The board members explained that part of the problem is tied to a shift in reading education from structured word literacy – which teaches the connections between letters and sounds – to balanced literacy.
Balanced literacy, dyslexia resources explain, is linked to “three cueing,” which rejects the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, readers make predictions about the words on the page using three cues: graphic cues, syntactic cues and semantic cues, according to a report in American Public Media.
Under three cueing, a child might be shown a picture of a puppy and a letter P and use the context to guess the word puppy. But dyslexics don’t think that way, the board members said. They need to be able to use the letters to form the words – to understand that deck isn’t spelled dek, that words that end with the k sound are spelled with ck.
Dyslexics need to learn the rules, the board members said. “Once they do that they can be very successful.”
The foundation undertakes various tasks. “We spend a lot of time hoping to educate teachers.” They work with legislators to get kids screened. They provide resources for parents and books for schools.
In conjunction with Dyslexia Awareness Month, the foundation is also launching a website and a social media presence. The hope is to get the website up by the end of the month.
Tweet David Beard @dbeardtdp Email dbeard@dominionpost.com
Dyslexia explained
The Intentional Dyslexia Association explains dyslexia as a neurological condition caused by a different wiring of the brain. There is no cure for dyslexia and individuals with this condition must learn coping strategies.
Research indicates that dyslexia has no relationship to intelligence. Individuals with dyslexia are neither more nor less intelligent than the general population. But some say the way individuals with dyslexia think can actually be an asset in achieving success.
In public school settings where many teachers are not knowledgeable about this condition, students with dyslexia may be considered stupid or lazy. Parents who have children diagnosed with dyslexia should seek out reading instruction that is based upon a systematic and explicit understanding of language structure, including phonics.
Dyslexia resource Nessy adds that dyslexia is not a physical problem with the eyes but a neurological difficulty with the brain. Many of the most common difficulties are caused by the way the brain recalls and works with letters and sounds, called phonological processing. When someone with dyslexia is reading or spelling, they have to hold a sequence of symbols in their head and process them into writing. Something in this process can go wrong.
Dyslexia expert and teacher Susan Barton offers a series of videos at a web resource called Bright Solutions for Dyslexia and says dyslexics have slightly different brains. Their left brain is the same size as other people’s, but their right brain is typically 10% bigger, which accounts for them often being gifted in various areas.
Dyslexia resources
- International Dyslexia Association – https://dyslexiaida.org
- Nessy – nessy.com/en-us
- Lexercise for dyslexia testing resources – lexercise.com
- Bright Solutions for Dyslexia – www.dys-add.com
- Mical, a dramatization of a true story of a British boy with dyslexia and his mother’s pioneering efforts to teach him – youtube.com/watch?v=p-Eycme4NFM
