Friday Musings: What’s the Matter with Winchester?

No more tortured metaphors this week, but I did want to write about one thing that has preoccupied me since I read this Special Education Report from Winchester Public Schools. Winchester’s Administrator of Special Education shared this report with the school committee on December 4th, 2018 (meeting minutes here). 

Per page 28 of this report, there was not a single first grader or kindergartener with a specific learning disability in Winchester Public Schools in 2017-18. This means that one of the best-regarded and best-funded school districts in the country did not identify a single first grader or kindergartener with dyslexia that year. 

According to this video, from United for Literacy-Winchester, Winchester Public Schools also failed to identify any first graders and kindergarteners with a specific learning disability in 2019-20. Unfortunately, the 2019-20 equivalent of the report is not available online.

We can argue about teaching philosophy. We can argue about budgets. We can argue about curricula. I find it impossible to believe that in a district of nearly 5000 students, there were no dyslexic first graders or kindergartners in two out of three years. 

We know that it is essential to identify struggling readers and students with dyslexia as soon as possible. The earlier the identification, the earlier the intervention, the earlier the progress. We know this. And what’s more, we know how to identify students at risk for dyslexia in kindergarten and in first grade (and even earlier with certain tools). 

To Winchester’s credit, they started using DIBELS to screen early elementary students this year. Hopefully, these numbers will start to change. But we need to make sure that this does not happen anywhere else. 

Part of this means making these data publicly available. Where is Winchester’s 2020 version of the 2017-18 report available online? Where are other districts’ reports? Where can we see how many students are being identified with SLD and in what grades they are being identified? This is essential information. 

As states begin to enforce screening laws and as districts begin to screen students more systematically, they need to assess how effective their tools and methods are. They should be asking themselves: “Why didn’t this particular 5th grader get flagged 5 years ago?” “What warning signs did me we miss?” “What can we do differently next time?” Schools won’t catch every student with dyslexia in first grade and kindergarten, but I’m pretty confident that they should be able to identify more students than they are identifying now. 

A good first step: states need to fund their toothless screening mandates and provide specific guidance on gold-standard screeners and how to use them. More on this soon.