Is it okay for her to fail?
Is it okay for her to fail?

7000 Students drop out of high school every day in New England!! Is that possibly true?  I recently took a trip to NYC and on the ride back I passed a billboard with that statistic. I could not believe it, so I looked it up online. In 2012-13, 85% of Massachusetts students graduated from high school. 3.3 million students were expected to graduate in 2013. I was happy to discover that in Massachusetts the number is not nearly as high. An average of 135 students a day or 50, 000 students a year drop out in Massachusetts, which is still a lot of kids.

I think one student is too many.  I am thankful that adult education and GED programs  exist for older students, but what if those students received the preventive supports  they needed before they became so frustrated. I hear stories all the time of children denied service because their grades were okay. I have personally known families’ struggling every day with their child to complete their homework each night, but still not qualifying for services. I have experienced this myself, and I was frustrated trying to get additional reading services for my child who tested above grade level, yet every night struggled to understand the books she read. I even offered to create a program to no avail.

I know as a society we have created a system to help, but students are falling through the crack every day.  Oh, and don’t forget the students who graduate but still don’t have the needed skills. I would like to see support services for typically developing students become more normalized. Unfortunately, for typically developing students accepting additional help all too often feels like a punishment, especially to students of color. How can we normalize and provide additional services to typically developing students with learning differences that they are unable to navigate alone?

Published by Kai Long

Kai currently lives in MA and is interested in collaborating with others to develop a deeper understanding of our speech and language needs.