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Bill would help dyslexic students
By Elise Franco
Austintown
A school district administrator’s personal experiences with dyslexia give him a better understanding of the intervention students with similar disabilities need to excel.
Vince Colaluca, Austintown superintendent, said he spent his elementary school years in reading intervention classes, but no one ever acknowledged that he might be dyslexic.
“Back in the ’70s when I was in elementary school, they knew some kids weren’t good readers, but they didn’t know why,” he said.
Colaluca, whose mild case causes him to sometimes invert numbers, said dyslexia isn’t recognized as an identifiable disability.
Dyslexia is described as a specific learning disorder that is neurological in origin and characterized by unexpected difficulties with accurate or fluent word recognition, poor spelling and decoding abilities not consistent with the person’s intelligence, motivation and sensory capabilities.
He said students who have reading issues undergo testing to determine their level of intervention, but the testing only reveals that the child has trouble with cognitive processing.
Though Austintown, like other school districts, has intervention courses in place for students, the curriculum isn’t tailored specifically to those with dyslexia.
Dyslexic children, like children with any learning disability, need intervention that supplements their normal classroom time, Colaluca said.
“Children who aren’t reading at their grade level need 30 to 90 extra minutes of reading instruction per day to get them to where they need to be,” he said. “Our goal is to make that time on top of core instruction and not instead of core instruction.”
Two weeks ago, however, the Ohio House of Representatives approved House Bill 96, which would categorize dyslexia as a specific learning disability and require one Ohio school to adopt a pilot project, said state Rep. Robert Hagan of Youngstown, D-60th.
He said the pilot project’s goal is to provide early screening and intervention services with the intent to eventually start similar programs across the state.
“We’ve been pushing this issue for many years,” he said. “It’s become more important because people started to recognize that it’s serious enough that you had to make room for it in the learning process.”
Hagan said the bill must go to the Senate Health Committee then to the full Senate floor for a vote. He said if it comes back to the House for approval without any changes it could go into effect July 1.
“Any impediment that interferes with the education of a child has to be rectified so there are no excuses about how a child can learn,” he said. “In many cases, children go through school without anyone recognizing the problems, and they continue to have problems later in life.”