Reply #23: My son is dyslexic; New Jersey doesn't recognize dyslexia.

[NNadir]

If you go on a dyslexia website and run through a check list of twenty "symptoms" my son comes out with 17 or 18.

This is a boy whose first kindergarten project was building a circuit and explaining the operation of a diode. Now, when he's entering 5th grade, his mother and I simply hope he doesn't have a nervous breakdown because he has to work 5 times as long as everyone else just to finish his homework.

He's a very good boy, polite, intelligent, kind, gracious, hard working, gentle and very bright, but - just like they tell you when you read about dyslexia - his academic elementary school has been a litany of (unnecessary) pain and struggle.

They have "offered" us ADD, AHDD, Asperger's syndrome (pretty crazy), autism. Each time we've been to the school, I've used there own testing to show that he is dyslexic. They don't get it. New Jersey apparently doesn't have any program that acknowledges dyslexia as a syndrome.

It's a genetic syndrome for crying out loud! My brother has it, my sister-in-law has it, my uncle had it, my grandfather had it. It's not even that rare. Hell, everybody on the planet has pretty much heard of it.

New Jersey: Nope, it doesn't exist.

The school did one thing for my son that I was always be grateful for though. In the third grade they gave him a tough but very competent reading teacher, in a special reading class. Up until that point we had lost all hope that our boy would ever read. She didn't bother with whether or not he had dyslexia, pretty much even refusing to discuss the subject, but, one way or another, she did get him to read. It's still a huge labor for that boy, but he can do it.

I will hold this teacher in the highest esteem for the rest of my life.