Posted on Mon, Jan. 05, 2004

WAR OF WORDS

Many children and adults with dyslexia struggle with

 low self-esteem and fears of being found out

Second of three parts

By Jennifer Radcliffe
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Jane Hubert spent years worried that she would be fired or have her bachelor's degree revoked if anyone heard her read aloud or saw her poor spelling.

Hubert, a teacher at Greenville Intermediate School east of Dallas, was convinced that she was stupid.

"I would sometimes wonder, 'Am I crazy?' " she said. "There were a lot of things I would try to hide."

Hubert, 53, was shocked three years ago when tests revealed that she had a high IQ and severe dyslexia. The process of rebuilding her tattered self-image has been slow but dramatic.

Like many dyslexics, Hubert was haunted by a cycle of failure. A Texas law passed in 1985 aims to break that cycle by requiring schools to identify and help dyslexic children as early as possible.

But many schools do not comply with the law, which requires them to provide early intervention, training for teachers and proven phonics programs to help struggling dyslexics learn to read.

Most of the 16 North Texas schools surveyed by the Star-Telegram provide phonics instruction to less than 1 percent of students, even though experts say as many as 20 percent -- or 840,000 of Texas' 4.2 million school- children -- have dyslexia.

The common learning disability makes it difficult for children to decipher the written language. Students who aren't identified and tutored are more likely to cheat, misbehave or feign illness to mask their reading troubles, educators said.

Dyslexic students face extreme frustration when they fall behind in school. They feel stupid and alone. They dread being judged or found out.

"They can make it, but what happens to that inner self is a crime," said Karen Vickery, who runs the Greenville school district's dyslexia program and the certified academic language therapist program at Southern Methodist University.

In more extreme cases, dyslexic students turn to drugs or crime because they find it too difficult to fit in at school, advocates said.

When students receive the proper instruction, they have an easier time fitting in and going on to college and successful careers. Most will always struggle to read, but their self-esteem will improve as they acquire the reading skills they need to succeed in class, educators said.

"They're not ever going to be cured," said Susie DeFrank, who runs the Mansfield school district's dyslexia program. "With dyslexia, you're born with it and you die with it."

About 75 percent of dropouts have trouble reading, according to research conducted by Reid Lyon of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. About half of adolescents with criminal records and substance abuse histories have reading problems, according to a study published by the National Institutes of Health in 2001.

Dyslexia is one of the leading causes of reading trouble, according to the International Dyslexia Association.

If all dyslexics had the instruction that state law mandates, their lives would probably be dramatically better, said Lucy Smith of Bedford, who runs a literacy program at three North Texas jails and prisons.

"It makes me emotional every time I drive by. To think, behind these razor wires are moms and sisters and grandmas and daughters," Smith said of the Gatesville Trusty Camp, where she tutors female inmates. "I just love every one of them."

Living with dyslexia

Dyslexics use different and less efficient parts of their brains to read than nondyslexics, so they have problems understanding the connection between letters and their sounds.

They must be taught the fundamentals of reading in a more direct, phonics-based way.

For dyslexics, reading is like trying to make sense of a foreign language they've never studied: It's exhausting and nearly impossible.

"You look at a word on a page, and it looks like random letters just thrown in," said 17-year-old Paige Thornsberry, a student at The Shelton School in Dallas, the nation's largest private school for students with learning disabilities.

The learning disability can make it difficult to finish schoolwork, fill out a job application, use public transportation, pay bills, follow instructions on medicine bottles and perform other daily tasks that many take for granted.

Reading movie subtitles, restaurant menus, office memos and advertisements can also be difficult, said Laura Cuellar, a 25-year-old with dyslexia.

The inability to read well can be alienating, said Cuellar, the volunteer coordinator for Goodwill Industries of Central Texas in Austin.

"In philosophy, you talk about language and how it forms a culture," she said. "I think people who are dyslexic are existing outside of that culture a little bit."

She remembers having nightmares that her classmates -- especially the cute boy -- would find out that she was dyslexic and spent an hour each morning with a private tutor.

"I was just afraid of being exposed," said Cuellar, who attended school in the Richardson district. "I was just afraid people were going to figure out that I was inadequate."

She remembers trying to memorize what her classmates read aloud so she could recite it when it was her turn. Once, she stole another student's homework and put her name on it.

And she remembers other children teasing her because she was dyslexic and had to attend a remedial class.

"They thought it was some sort of communicable disease," she said. "Even after that was explained, they thought it was a code word for being stupid."

But Cuellar said her struggles have made her stronger and more determined. She graduated with a bachelor's degree from Southwestern University in Georgetown.

Katie Cantrell, a former Southlake resident and a freshman at McMurry University in Abilene, said she doesn't let having dyslexia bother her. In fact, it has made her more determined, she said.

She's studying to be a neonatologist and said she has many strengths that most people without learning disabilities don't have. She aced biology and can remember the phone numbers of long-lost childhood friends.

She doesn't want people to feel sorry for her.

"It's not crippling," said Cantrell, 18. "They sit there and say, 'Oh, I'm so sorry.' It's not something I want to be pitied for. I have to learn a different way. That's just the way life is."

An internal war

Others are unable to cope with the learning disability.

Ann Williams of San Angelo, for example, is sure her son James committed suicide in 1985 because he couldn't get the upper hand in his fight with dyslexia and the depression that accompanied it.

The 21-year-old was faltering in college and had always battled low self-esteem.

"He just got so down on himself," she said. "It was just so hard."

Her son's teachers were never much help, Williams said.

"They kept saying he would grow out of it. Of course, you don't grow out of it," said Williams, 67, who founded the James Phillip Williams Foundation to help train teachers to work with dyslexic students.

After Hubert's dyslexia was diagnosed, she began studying the same two-year dyslexia curriculum that students are taught in the Greenville school district. She now teaches the phonics-based curriculum, called the Multisensory Teaching Approach.

Experts say it is a teaching model more schools should adopt.

"It empowers you," Hubert said. "All of a sudden, you're not at the mercy of words. You can control those words."

But in many cases, schools don't provide students with that empowerment. Instead, they place students with dyslexia in special-education classes, which parents and experts say may be inappropriate.

National statistics show that 80 percent of special-education students have dyslexia. Many area school officials said they cannot calculate how many of their special-education students are dyslexic because children in those programs are labeled simply as having a learning disability.

That's what happened to Christopher Trott, who spent a large portion of his days in the Plano school district's special-education classes.

"I was put in there with kids with Down syndrome," said Trott, 24, who has mild dyslexia and severe attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder. "I slept through it."

Trott said that he felt he didn't belong in the public school system and that the special-education classes strengthened that feeling. He is serving a six-year sentence for burglary in the Hutchins State Jail in southeast Dallas County.

Students are able to size up their academic abilities at an early age, Smith said, and if they aren't offered help in their areas of weakness, they sometimes chalk themselves up as failures.

"Every kindergartner comes to school eager to learn," she said. "If, by the end of the third or fourth grade, he's failing, he's discovered he doesn't have a way out."

That was a discovery Timothy Velasquez, also a Hutchins inmate, grappled with daily as a student at Travis High School in Austin.

"When you're young and you're insecure, everybody accelerates and you just stay on the same level," said Velasquez, now 25. "It's not cool to deal with. I felt like I didn't belong anywhere."

Smith teaches her phonics-based classes at Hutchins State Jail in the hope of helping the inmates improve their lives. Velasquez and others at the jail who are taking Smith's classes said they are ready to learn. They're tired of not being able to read a menu or a bus route. They're tired of carrying around old, completed job applications so they can transfer the information to new ones.

The inmates who are parents worry that their children will have dyslexia, too, because it tends to run in families. They hope their children are receiving the same type of reading lessons they are getting.

"I want them to be better," Velasquez said of his 2-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. "I don't want them to be here. I feel like I'm wasting my life."

Moving forward

Carrollton resident Pam Thornsberry said she watched as her daughter Paige's self-image was shattered in the public school system.

"By the fourth grade, she was taking antacids every day before school," Thornsberry said. "She was really headed downhill fast."

Now, after transferring to The Shelton School, Paige Thornsberry is slated to graduate fifth in her class in May. She hopes to attend the University of North Texas and to use her perspective to become a teacher who helps dyslexic students.

She would be following in the footsteps of Hubert, who realized that she had much to offer students and adults with dyslexia. After receiving instruction, Hubert had the confidence to teach some of the dyslexia classes in her district and to help other adults who were just learning that they had dyslexia.

"I tell the children and I tell myself, 'This is hard for me, but it doesn't mean I'm dumb,' " Hubert said. "I want to give them what I didn't have."

SYMPTOMS OF DYSLEXIA

Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by difficulties in spelling, sounding out and recognizing words. A school-age child with dyslexia might:

• Avoid reading or complain about the difficulty.

• Display strengths in higher-level thinking skills, such as curiosity and imagination.

• Mispronounce complicated or unfamiliar words.

• Leave out parts of words or confuse the order of parts. For example, "aluminum" becomes "amulium."

• Pause, hesitate, often say "um" when speaking.

• Use vague words, such as "stuff" and "things," instead of proper names.

• Confuse words that sound alike, such as "tornado" for "volcano" and "lotion" for "ocean."

• Need more time to form verbal responses.

• Have trouble remembering isolated pieces of verbal information, such as dates, names and lists.

• Progress slowly in acquiring reading skills.

• Guess or make wild stabs at words when reading.

• Rely heavily on context to read.

• Fear reading aloud.

• Mispronounce and substitute words when reading aloud.

• Perform disproportionately worse on multiple-choice tests than on other types.

• Spell or write poorly.

SOURCE: Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level, by Sally Shaywitz

IN THEIR WORDS

Here's what people with dyslexia and related disorders say about their learning disabilities:

"Dyslexics have to do more work. So what? We're not dumb."

-- Jimmy Dilavore, 9, third-grader at Bowie Elementary School in Greenville

"When I was younger, I thought I was stupid. I pretty much thought I wasn't going to high school."

-- Paige Thornsberry, 17, senior at The Shelton School in Dallas

"I would read (aloud) and ... it was pointless. It was like if you pushed someone out of a wheelchair and said, 'Get back up by yourself' and then pushed the wheelchair across the hall."

-- Sean Fraser, 18, Tarrant County College freshman

"I think being dyslexic has given me an advantage. I'm a dyslexic, and so what? I type in the word, and I do spell check."

-- Daniel Mendenhall, 19, senior at The Shelton School in Dallas

"You feel like an outsider when you are watching a foreign film and the subtitles are moving too quickly, when the audience is laughing and you're still trying to catch up."

-- Laura Cuellar, 25, volunteer coordinator for Goodwill Industries of Central Texas in Austin

"I have a hard time spelling, but I know how to use the dictionary. I play Scrabble real well. ... I probably could win the Scrabble tournament here -- if they had one."

-- Draco Phillips, 30, Hutchins State Jail inmate

"When I was going to school, I had kids laughing at me. ... I didn't have nobody helping me."

-- Leroy Anderson, 35, Oak Cliff resident who is learning to read at Literacy Instruction for Texas

"It carries on with you because you're not normal like other folks. It's been a life struggle. It's been extremely hard."

-- Lee Sessions, 40, Hutchins State Jail inmate

About this series

Sunday: Many North Texas public school districts have not fully complied with a state law requiring instruction for dyslexic students.

Today: Jane Hubert thought she was crazy or stupid despite her bachelor's degree and her teaching job. Then, at age 50, she learned the truth.

Tuesday: Trained teachers and educated parents are the best hope for young dyslexics.

ONLINE

• For a multimedia presentation, go to www.star-telegram.com

To comment on this story, contact Assistant Metro Editor Sonny Bohanan at (817) 685-3825 or sbohanan@star-telegram.com