Success is often measured by whether you were among the many to attain it. High school graduation is one example, as a steady line of older teenagers walk in procession to shake the hands of the school executives and obtain their diplomas.
Occasionally, however, the measure of true success comes from what you did that was different from the masses. For a high school graduate named Aleysha Ortiz, her diploma meant something much more than surviving twelve years of a public school education system.
Aleysha came into the Hartford, Connecticut schools after her family moved stateside from Puerto Rico when she was only six years old. She had no English skills at all. The education system apparently didn’t have or offer ESL (English as a Second Language) courses to young elementary school students. Words meant nothing to her because she couldn’t decipher them. The few she managed to reason out came from association, such as through subtitles on television or karaoke lyrics.
She struggled with classes, not just due to the lack of attention, but her diagnosis of ADHD, problems involving her being able to handle writing tools such as pencils, speech issues and the language barrier. Realize that she was in school in 2012, with fewer resources than are available today, but with lesson plans individualized to each student, and which were generally ignored by the faculty.
Once Aleysha was able to utilize text-to-speech, she dedicated herself to spending her evenings bringing her grades up. Google became her educator.
She graduated high school unable to read or write English, and with little to no math skills. Legal processes are being started against the system for not only their neglect, but their ignorance of Aleysha’s needs. If they didn’t understand her spoken communication, they simply shrugged it off without taking the extra step to find a speech therapist for her. She would be punished instead of redirected when things became difficult for the teachers or principal. Staff even laughed at her.
Through her efforts and perseverance, Aleysha became an honor student eligible for graduation with some conditions, including deferring her diploma for more focused remedial instruction. Deciding that was too little too late, Aleysha began taking part-time college classes last August and, while the legal investigation continues, she is determined to help others like her who are not given the boost they need to catch up within the public school system.
Public schools do not want to individualize the students’ needs. They want to crank every student through the system just like a car is built on a production line. This is why cars are recalled after leaving the plant; when there is a defect, the car still gets delivered and the company decides to deal with problems later.
A person unable to read or write standard English at age 19 is not a problem to deal with later. It’s an opportunity to take a detour with the usual assembly line education system and give the attention needed to the problem. Parents should also be on board with this philosophy. Your child is not like one hundred others, nor should they be treated like one. This also means that, when something is short of what is expected, time to fix it before moving on is vital.
Many schools from other countries do not take summer breaks. This doesn’t mean the families don’t take vacations, but life and school are treated the same way; as a part of everyday growth. Children learn daily, and not by taking one straight road, but by detouring to where the language skills get tweaked or the math abilities get reinforced, and then resuming the main road to becoming a fully educated young adult.
The system failed Aleysha. How are they failing, or have they already failed, your children?
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