'She got nothing' — Mother describes six-year journey to help daughter with dyslexia
Leonia Geraghty from Virginia, Co Cavan, with her daughters Paige and Nevaeh.
Partially deaf, Leonie Geraghty still remembers how it felt to wait a year for an appointment to assess her hearing while in school, leaving her with no hearing aid.
“For six years, to think my daughter was sitting there feeling what I felt for one year just broke me,” she said.
When her daughter Paige was in junior infants, she noticed that she was writing her name backwards from right to left. That was the beginning of a six-year journey to get her daughter assessed for dyslexia.
From that moment, she was met with resistance from her school, feeling as though she was shrugged off every year as a new teacher took over Paige’s education.
Despite bringing her concerns to Paige’s teachers over the years, as well as the school principal, Ms Geraghty was repeatedly told that her daughter was not dyslexic or to “wait and see”, with the school repeatedly refusing to fill out a report for an assessment.
Paige had been achieving normal sTen scores, which are standardised tests in English reading and maths.
“She was remembering the books by hearing them and by the pictures, her spelling was really bad and she was still flipping words and letters and everything else,” she said.
Meanwhile, Paige was coming home exhausted, crying, and not wanting to return to school the next day, but did not understand why.
Ms Geraghty decided to take matters into her own hands and take Paige for a private assessment, which required a report to be filled in by her teacher.
She pleaded with the teacher to observe Paige closely for one day and compare her to her peers while in class.
The report returned by Paige’s teacher observed her struggling to take down notes from the blackboard, daydreaming, and struggling to keep involved.
Once the assessment was done by a psychologist, six years after her mother initially raised concerns, it was revealed that Paige was indeed dyslexic, and at the age of 11, she had the reading level of a six-year-old.
“If they had listened to me six years ago, she would have got some intervention and support in school, some resources, but she got nothing,” she said.
Paige is what some describe as a “masker”, being able to keep up in class by learning everything by heart for a short term.
However, the battle did not end there, and despite the report recommending one-on-one support and noting that assistive technology is “essential”, the school refused, saying she was still doing well enough in tests.
Ms Geraghty’s other daughter Nevaeh, who recently began secondary school, has also recently been assessed, confirming that she is dyslexic after her sTen scores began to decline at the end of sixth class.
Upon receiving Nevaeh’s report, Ms Geraghty said: “The teacher never said to me the struggles my daughter was actually having in class.”
Having not received the recommended interventions, Ms Geraghty is now providing one-on-one support to her daughters, teaching them new research-informed ways of learning.
She said she has since found five other parents in similar situations in the same school alone.
“I've linked in with TDs in the area telling them this story, and some of them are shocked,” she said. "They didn't even realise that this is going on within the educational system."
Dyslexia Association of Ireland CEO Rosie Bissett said there are countless parents in similar situations.
She said a lack of access to assessments is a fundamental issue, leading to countless children not having the opportunity to understand or describe what is happening for them.
Issues surrounding access to assessment are multi-faceted, with an under-resourced public system and a lack of adequate training for teachers to name but a few.
School for children with dyslexia can be traumatising, as they are left feeling confused and misunderstood, she said.
They feel so frustrated because they're often putting in as much or more effort than maybe their non-dyslexic peers,” she said.
According to the latest data from the Dyslexia Association, Ms Bissett said just 14% of individuals are getting their assessment publicly through the National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS).
She said NEPS, which is “massively under-resourced and unable to meet the real level of need”, is very slow to assess for dyslexia, primarily due to under-resourcing.
“So essentially, it's just driving inequity," she said.
She said schools advising parents that it is better to assess at a later age is a common misconception, driven by the fact that it is almost impossible to get assessed publicly.
“We do assessments ourselves here in the association, and we will happily assess a child from mid-senior infants,” she said.
“Early identification and early intervention, we know, are really important and we would love to see assessment being done much earlier so that we're not putting children through these additional years of trauma."
One such person who was assessed early on in life is Dylan Sweeney.
Now a secondary school teacher in geography and business in Dublin, he was assessed while in senior infants. He says he was “lucky”, adding that he couldn’t understand information that others could, resulting in him “acting out”.
“You view the world slightly differently, and when you’re in education and everything is taught the same way and other people can understand but you can’t, that’s where the frustration comes out,” he said.
Mr Sweeney attended a dyslexia primary school for two years, which helped him “leaps and bounds” before returning to his original primary school.
“It taught me coping mechanisms and different ways of learning,” he said.
“I was in a very fortunate position that people spotted it so early.
Similarly, Garrett O’Mahony from Kenmare was celebrating his son’s Junior Cert results last week.
His son was assessed in first class after showing signs from an early age, including learning material off by heart and frequently asking to leave the classroom to avoid questions.
“We didn’t have any of the nightmare stories, it was picked up really fast,” he said.
After being assessed, Mr O’Mahony’s son went to St Oliver’s National School in Killarney.
“He went in unable to read and he came out reading, all of the supports were there,” he said, adding: “This all happened because of early intervention, and I’ll have no one tell me otherwise. The outcome was that he passed every subject in his Junior Cert.”
