Dear Kate Jones I am writing this letter on behalf of my son and others who fly under the radar. He is 10 years old. We have just found ...

Colleen's Red Letter

19:57:00 Dyslexia Australia 0 Comments

Dear Kate Jones

I am writing this letter on behalf of my son and others who fly under the radar.

He is 10 years old. We have just found out he is dyslexic,  even though I have known since he was five years old, we have just got a formal diagnosis.

In getting this diagnosis I am relieved that mothers intuition was correct,  but also very sad and frustrated at what we call an education system. I know I'm not alone and there are lots of us who feel the same way. We send our children everyday to school to learn, but in return we receive our children back broken, frustrated, stressed, embarassed, lacking self esteem and confidence in themselves and we as parents have to deal with this, as if parenting is not hard enough. Our children hold it together at school and then meltdown for us at home. My son is not a behaviour concern at school, he is caring, compassionate, creative and amazing in maths, but a failure of the system, a system that is supposed to educate him.

Not one teacher in 6 years of school has ever expressed a concern that he is a D student in literacy and constantly gets zero on his spelling test. The one time I brought up my concerns I was told he is young he will catch up. Imagine my frustration that  none of these professional people could see that there was an issue, I then started to think it was in my head and that I was paranoid and making more out of it. Imagine if my son was in another family, one which mum gave up and decided that there wasn't anything wrong, what would happen to that child. He may end up in a juvenille detention because of this system.

My son unfortunately is a failure of the system, it wasn't my parenting. He is one of many highly intelligent, beautiful, talented students who are flying under the radar.

How does this continually happen? Why do parents have to advocate so much for a basic right of being educated?

Something needs to be done to help these students.

Thank you for reading.
One frustrated mummy (Colleen)

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