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EDITORIAL: Early screening for dyslexia is long overdue

Salem News - 10/22/2018

Oct. 22--Gov. Charlie Baker this week signed a long overdue bill that requires earlier testing and a more adequate state response to dyslexia. Advocates have sought earlier screening for the learning disability for years. Now, education officials will put together guidelines for testing those children who show just one sign of it.

Addressing dyslexia is the next step. And while this bill makes important progress toward that goal, it also underscores an urgent need for the Legislature to revisit the state's 25-year-old education funding formula.

That formula, which lays out how much the state spends on local schools for special education and other things, is meant to be recalculated every four years. Instead it's been collecting dust.

The most recent effort to rewrite it fell apart just this summer. A Beacon Hill conference committee was tasked with ironing out plans to adjust funding while dealing with four critical areas -- health care for school faculty and staff, educating low-income students, teaching kids who are still learning English, and special education. But when lawmakers ended formal sessions at the end of July, to head home and campaign for re-election, the committee's work was unfinished.

It's doubtless that a massive price tag -- the committee was looking at plans to ratchet state spending by some $2 billion per year -- played a role in slowing negotiations. Regardless of why the effort fell apart, lawmakers need to quickly return to the job and figure out a way to make it work.

Early testing for dyslexia, it turns out, has some potential to be a money-saver in the long run. By some accounts, as many as 4 in 5 special education students in the state share the disability, according to the group Decoding Dyslexia Massachusetts, "but schools do not have the current most informed understanding of dyslexia and do not identify it, or mis-categorize it."

Indeed, according to the group, screening among pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first-grade students -- followed by evidence-based reading programs -- can avert failure at reading and improve children's ability. Such intervention not only helps students, it makes special education programs more effective.

"The earlier you identify what's going on, the less of an impact it will have on a child's educational outcome. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes," Lisa Nelson, of Groton, a co-founder of the state chapter of Decoding Dyslexia, recently explained to Statehouse reporter Christian Wade.

Dyslexia screening and intervention shouldn't increase spending, she noted. And in light of the vast number of people with some form of the disability -- nearly 1 in 6, by some estimates -- it's a wonder the state hasn't acted sooner to step up screening. The latest bill, fashioned from proposals written by Sens. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester, and Barbara L'Italien, D-Andover, also calls for better training of teachers to detect the disability and help children who have it.

Still, school administrators are anxious that doing that much will force districts to spend money they don't have. Tom Scott, director of the state Association of School Superintendents, suggests the bill represents "another unfunded mandate."

Again, it's imperative that the state get a handle on the realities of special education costs, instead of allowing costs to continue to pile on top of local school budgets.

Students with this learning disability need help and they need it early, as this bill promises to do, but school districts also need help ensuring they can afford it.

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(c)2018 The Salem News (Beverly, Mass.)

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