Dyslexia

Poor children in Baltimore and across the nation are less likely to be identified as dyslexic at an early age and get the help they need to overcome their reading difficulties than children in middle-class families, according to an Abell Foundation report released recently. The report, written by former city school board member and education consultant Kalman R. Hettleman, calls for changes in federal laws that dictate how dyslexia is diagnosed. Hettleman's report also contends that the definition of dyslexia works against children from poor families.

Learning differently hasn't stopped Jason Berman from pursuing his dream of becoming a filmmaker nor has it eroded his confidence. A senior at Friends School in Baltimore, Berman said he learned at an early age that he had to persevere because he has dyslexia. He is a bright, ambitious and focused teen-ager who knows what he wants and figures out how to get it - such as the $30,000 scholarship he won recently from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Berman, 19, of Pikesville and a student from Tennessee were the only recipients in the country, selected from among 600 candidates after a rigorous, four-month application process.

An educator from California has been named director of the Jemicy School in Owings Mills, effective July 1. Benjamin Shifrin, 47, head of Emanuel Academy of Beverly Hills, will replace interim Director Mark Westervelt, a 28-year teacher at Jemicy School. Westervelt will be assistant director under Shifrin. Jemicy School is a private coeducational school for children with dyslexia. Founded in 1973, it was one of the first schools in the nation for children with dyslexia, a neurological condition that impairs the ability to recognize and comprehend the written word.

When the Knights and Ladies Club at The Lab School meets each day, the children pack a lot of learning into an hour. The pupils in this academic club learn passwords to enter and leave the simulated castle in their classroom, dress in period costumes, play the roles of monks and work on calligraphy. They listen to the teacher read aloud from The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, and learn about Medieval England, the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror. More important, they learn to focus so they can decode words - break them into chunks to sound them out - for reading.

MARGARET BYRD Rawson died a week ago, and the stories are still flowing. That's partly because Rawson accomplished more in her long life than any two - maybe three - mere mortals. She founded schools and international organizations. She wrote nine books. She traced the lives of 56 Pennsylvania boys for an astonishing 55 years. She put dyslexia, the learning disability, on the educational map and removed its stigma in school circles. She also lived to 102 in reasonably good physical and excellent mental shape.

Margaret Byrd Rawson, who helped generations of young people overcome the reading disability dyslexia, died Sunday at Foxes Spy, her home near Frederick. She was 102. Since the mid-1930s, when Mrs. Rawson was a teacher and librarian at a private school near Philadelphia, she had campaigned tirelessly for greater understanding of dyslexia, a neurological disorder that causes difficulty in reading. Frustrated at her inability to teach a bright second-grader to read, Mrs. Rawson discovered the work of Samuel T. Orton, a neurologist who was the first in the country to identify dyslexia and trace its origin.

THE KIDS, AND there were plenty of them in the crowded auditorium, saw Henry Winkler as a brilliant and very funny speaker, a man who overcame dyslexia to become a successful actor, producer and director. But when I looked at the stage at Calvert Hall College High School in Towson, I saw the character Winkler made famous: the Fonz, that leather-jacketed greaser of Happy Days. He's a quarter-century older now, silver-haired, a little wider at the waist. But still he's the Fonz. I expected Winkler to turn thumbs up and render Fonzie's patented "Aaayh!"

As Dyslexia Awareness Week winds down today, don't let the opportunity to learn about it slip away. Though some may think dyslexia is synonymous with difficulty in learning how to read, it is generally defined as a language-based learning disability (affecting 15 to 17 percent of the population). Dyslexia can make it very difficult for a student to succeed academically - but that doesn't mean that success in other matters is elusive. "Many disabilities that produce failure in traditional schools might be seen as abilities in life's rough waters," explains Sally Smith in her book Succeeding Against the Odds.

ROGER E. SAUNDERS is a very modest man. He didn't want to be photographed for this article, and he didn't want me to discuss his monumental contribution to our understanding of the reading disorder dyslexia. The latter is hard to do. The 77-year-old clinical psychologist is behind almost every leaf of the dyslexia-awareness tree. Twenty-eight years ago, he helped establish the Jemicy School for dyslexic children, now in Owings Mills. He was instrumental in building what is now the International Dyslexia Association, based in Towson.

WHEN MONTEARA Johnson heard she was going to a "tutoring place" for dyslexics, her heart sank. She was 10 years old, had a history of academic failure, had repeated the fourth grade. Monteara had never heard of dyslexia, the reading disorder. When her great-grandmother said she was being referred for tutoring, it confirmed her worst fear. "I thought it was a place where you go when you're stupid." The other day, Monteara walked breezily into her grandmother's living room in West Baltimore and plopped a Judy Blume novel on the coffee table.