I’ve spent my career working in specialized private schools for children with dyslexia. These schools are incredible. The teachers and administration are passionately dedicated to ensuring that every child in the building receives exactly what they need to gain literacy skills and reach their potential. Yet, I’ve always felt that I’m part of the problem.

If we agree that reading is a fundamental human right and gateway to education, then we are doing an abysmal job of ensuring access to this right. The tuition for these specialized schools runs between $40,000-75,000 a year and there are massive hurdles to overcome just to learn about these schools and their hefty price tags. While it is possible to get state funding to send your child to one of these specialized schools, it is virtually impossible to do so without the help of a legal team that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Before even contemplating the idea of amassing a legal team, parents have numerous, daunting obstacles to face. While public schools can provide an evaluation to determine a learning disability such as dyslexia, these evaluations can be limited in scope and are also difficult to acquire. Parents of struggling readers are often met with the response that they should be patient and let their child develop at their own rate, or, read more books to them at home. Schools are more apt to discuss behavior challenges (that often stem from a child’s frustration with their struggle to acquire literacy skills) than they are reading challenges. This approach is backward. It fails to address the urgent reality that giving a child the instruction they need mitigates behavior issues, further delays a struggling reader from getting a dyslexia diagnosis, and can mire a student in an endless cycle of lowered expectations, failure, and negative behavior and academic outcomes.

I’ve been on the receiving end of countless stories of parents who got fed up with the bureaucracy of it all and sought out a private neuropsychological evaluation to receive a dyslexia diagnosis. Yet these evaluations, which explore the connections between brain functioning and learning patterns, remain firmly ensconced behind price tags of $3,000-5,000, 6+ month waiting lists, and privileged networks of communities “in the know” of where and how to gain access to the evaluations. Giving up on the public system to receive a private evaluation is, in and of itself, a privilege. The barriers parents must fight require time, money, and professional connections.

This deeply flawed system is why access to evidence-based reading instruction is an issue of social justice. As long as free, universal dyslexia screening and intervention remain elusive, the diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia will remain a diagnosis for the privileged. As parents and children are at the mercy of school funding models and the timing and intent of policymakers,  Redwood Literacy seeks to disrupt this status quo of privileged access to reading instruction. Through free reading screeners, reduced rate evaluations, partnerships with public schools that bring reading intervention to students during the school day, and sliding scale tuition for reading intervention, Redwood circumvents the flawed system of privilege and works to ensure every child can access their birthright of literacy.