Missouri's legislative task force on dyslexia heard testimony during a Thursday meeting at the Capitol suggesting the state's teachers are not prepared to deal with dyslexia to the extent the task force would like.
Dyslexia is a learning disorder that can cause students to read sentences backward, invert letters or words while reading or writing, mix up letters and numbers, or have difficulty matching written letters with their spoken sounds.
The disorder occurs in children with average vision and intelligence and is caused by inherited traits that affect how the brain makes connections while learning, according to Mayo Clinic.
One of every five people in the country is affected by dyslexia, and many may not even know until they're adults.
House Bill 2379, sponsored by state Rep. Kathryn Swan, R-Cape Girardeau, established Missouri's legislative task force on dyslexia last year. By the end of 2017, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) must also "develop guidelines for the appropriate screening of students for dyslexia and related disorders and the necessary classroom supports for students with dyslexia and related disorders."
Beginning with the 2018-19 school year, all public schools will have to conduct dyslexia screenings for students and have the "reasonable classroom support consistent with the guidelines" developed by DESE from the task force's recommendations.
Swan, who is on the task force, told the News Tribune the panel has shared those completed recommendations with the governor, DESE and the joint committee on education.
Now, she said, "we're tackling some of the additional recommendations we need to make, and one of the big ones is preparation of teachers."
Swan said the task force was in "exploration mode" Thursday, as they heard testimony from representatives of four of the state's 42 teacher preparation programs and asked what their institutions were doing to help new teachers identify dyslexia.
David Hough, dean of Missouri State University's college of education, praised his institution's education program, but readily admitted "they don't deal with this. They don't address dyslexia. It's not taught."
"We mention it in our courses," Hough said, "but mentioning isn't teaching."
The feeling of the task force is the degree to which courses, textbooks and resident experts specifically address dyslexia in the education of teachers greatly varies among institutions across the state - if they exist at all in any given program.
Hough said an immediate solution would be professional development.
"We do the best we can to have a teacher ready day one, but they need professional development for their entire career," he said. "Long term, how we build it into our programs, honestly, that's just problematic, because like I said, you can't be all things to all people in four years. And I think if we added a dyslexia component to our programs and added other components, we could do that, but it's going to require that students stay in school longer to complete a degree before they can teach."
The task force is asking general education classroom teachers "to have a greater knowledge of dyslexia than they have right now," Swan said. "We want every classroom teacher to at least be able to identify what might be some characteristics of dyslexia," because students can't get interventions without identification, she added.
The task force feels this is particularly important because while special education teachers can have some dyslexia-specific expertise, many students with reading disorders do not qualify for special education programs, creating a crack in the system.
Swan said teachers can do simple things for students with dyslexia without even needing a diagnosis.
The mandated screenings would not themselves be diagnoses, but indicators of risk.
"Maybe they need to be moved closer to the whiteboard," Swan offered as an example of something a typical classroom teacher can do for a student, also noting giving verbal tests instead of written ones or giving more time for tests.
The task force commenced work Thursday on creating questionnaires to send to the other teacher preparation programs in the state, in effort to collect as much information as possible to quantify the scope of the issue of adequate teacher education.
The task force includes three other legislators, the commissioner of education and DESE's dyslexia specialist, parents of children with dyslexia, a private citizen who has dyslexia, treatment providers and representatives of the Missouri State Teachers Association, the Missouri School Boards' Association and dyslexia-focused organizations.