Southern Poverty Law Center

Her school district in the Atlanta metro area ignored her learning disability...

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Georgia teen with dyslexia gets education assistance, thanks to SPLC lawsuit

By Rhonda Sonnenberg | Read the full story here

Friend,

Trinity is a lot like most 16-year-old girls. The rising high school sophomore speed-texts with her friends about everything and nothing and looks forward to the day when she can drive a car. When she is old enough, she wants to be an esthetician.

What Trinity has never confided in most of her close friends is that she struggles to read or write those texts herself because of her untreated dyslexia. Her school district in the Atlanta metro area ignored her learning disability and promoted her from grade to grade – even to high school when she could only read at a first-grade level. She became clever about concealing her disability, either using her phone’s dictation function to send texts or handing her phone to friends and running off, telling them, “I’m too busy. You write back for me.”

“I didn’t want anyone to know and spread rumors about me,” Trinity said. “I felt like I couldn’t trust people. I was scared what they would think of me.”

Now, because of a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center that was settled in May, she will finally get the education services to which she is entitled under federal law. The DeKalb County School District agreed to pay $49,000 for intensive, one-on-one instruction by a specially trained tutor using proven methods developed for students with dyslexia.

“The district took no responsibility for its failure to educate Trinity,” said Eugene Choi, a senior staff attorney with the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team. “From her early school years on, when Trinity’s mother expressed concerns about possible dyslexia, she received misplaced blame for Trinity’s reading struggles, instead of the evaluation and interventions she needed. Instead of supporting Trinity’s learning, the district blamed her for having a disability – wasting time, energy and resources defending its discriminatory practices.

“Students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities should not need lawyers to learn to read. When Trinity and her family refused to accept anything less than justice, the district finally agreed to settle her case.”

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Sincerely,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center

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The Southern Poverty Law Center

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Montgomery, AL 36104

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