This student faced over a year of extreme reading failure before finding us. They had been identified by the school as a struggling reader in 2nd grade and had received over a year of ineffective reading interventions. Vision and hearing were checked and found to be normal. The student came from a loving, two parent home and had been in the same school for their entire career. In the fall of 3rd grade the family found Sea Bean as the child was completely turned off to reading and was calling themselves ‘the worst reader in the class.’
After completing a comprehensive reading assessment, we created a learning plan, individualized to this child’s needs as well as learning strengths. In 23 one-hour sessions between October and December, this child grew nearly 40 RIT points on the school’s own assessment. This child went from being well below the 10th percentile nationally to being near the 80th percentile!
As explained in other success stories, this child’s growth was unprecedented and unlikely if there was a true language-based learning disability. Unfortunately, the school had taken steps to begin a special education referral and sadly, labeled this child as learning disabled in the winter just before this data was released. The fact this child was able to continue to grow in the 2nd half of the year is further evidence of a lack of a language-based learning disability. This child was under instructed or improperly instructed which led to massive reading gaps and low self-esteem.
While this child was brought to Sea Bean because of their reading issues, it’s interesting to see how the math improved significantly over the same period. As so much of math now involves reading, when we address the literacy concerns, often we see an improvement in the math scores as well. We provided NO math instruction to this child.
Perhaps what’s even more disturbing about this success story was the fact that Sea Bean saw several students from this SAME school and these SAME grades with the SAME exact profile indicating a failure of the general curriculum to education ALL children first. Ultimately, this child learned to read and love reading thanks to her parent’s vigilance. But one must wonder, what’s happening to all those other children??
