GUILDERLAND — Three parents told the school board heart-wrenching stories Tuesday night about their children’s difficulties learning to read.
"Steve and I were sad," Nancy Andress, the district’s assistant superintendent for instruction, said yesterday. Referring to herself and Steve Hadden, the administrator for special education, she went on, "We really do work so hard to meet with parents and meet children’s needs, to listen and be responsive."

They told The Enterprise they had no inkling that the three parents who spoke were feeling such frustration.

Four years ago, when some parents raised concerns about how the district teaches reading, the board decided the matter should be handled by teachers and administrators. This time, several board members wanted to get involved, with one adamantly demanding answers.
In 2003, Melissa Mirabile founded a group for parents whose children struggled to read. The group cited "scientifically-based research" and advocated systematic and specific instruction in five areas — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — as recommended by the National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress.

Guilderland administrators, however, said their reading program, 20 years in the making, had as its greatest strength the teacher’s ability to adapt lessons to individual student needs.
"We know change can be scary," said Mirabile at the time, "but it doesn’t make it wrong."

After a packed meeting in January of 2004, the school board held firm against making changes to its reading curriculum or setting up an advisory board to discuss it.
"We really are not resistant to change," Andress said yesterday. "We’re always looking for new things"Not a week goes by that other school districts don’t ask what’s working in our district."

Parents speak out

Kellie Baldwin opened Tuesday’s public-comment session by talking about her 12-year-old son, James; he has been in the Guilderland schools since kindergarten and is now in seventh grade.
Describing his struggles in elementary school, she said, "I was really concerned about his reading progress."

Baldwin asked that he be kept back a year, but the school didn’t want to, she said.
When she saw no progress in sixth grade, she asked that his reading be assessed, she said; it was and "showed no growth whatsoever."

She requested an outside evaluation and discovered her son was reading at a second-grade level. The evaluator recommended a tutor and, over the summer before middle school, James made his greatest gains. In the fall of 2006, though, he missed two months of school due to illness.

Baldwin had had a meeting to discuss her son’s individual education plan (IEP) the day before, she said, and the outside evaluator had requested one-on-one reading sessions three times a week, but the school seemed reluctant, she said.
"I have a seventh-grader at a third-grade level," said Baldwin. "To me, that is unacceptable...We need to find a way this child can be taught better."

Michael Haley told the board about his 13-year-old son who wants to read the latest Harry Potter book but is unable to.
He was diagnosed with dyslexia as "part of the IEP process," said Haley.
Parents, he said, are often unfamiliar with such disorders and "have to rely a great deal on the special-education team."
For years, Haley was told his son was "making progress," he said. "I didn’t see how that was true."

When his son got to third and fourth grade, Haley said, he started asking how his son was doing in relation to his peers.
"I never got a straight answer," he said.
What he wanted to know, he said, was, "Are we closing the gap or is it getting worse"...It was impossible to evaluate."
Haley termed his son’s two years at Farnsworth Middle School "a nightmare."

The emphasis on independence might work well for normal middle-school students, he said, but not for someone like his son who had to spend two-and-a-half to three hours on homework while a neighbor’s child would take just 40 minutes to an hour to complete the work.
"He was tired, he was burned out, and he was doomed to failure," said Haley.
"How many parents are home right now with no hope of progress"" he asked.

Haley told The Enterprise later that his son is now at the Maritime Academy, a BOCES program for 20 students.
"Unfortunately, when a child like my son is mainstreamed, the priority is the majority," Haley said. "The special-education needs are secondary. The teachers he is with now understand his limitations and are willing to adjust to help him."
Gregg Gerety was the third parent to address the board Tuesday night. He introduced himself as an endocrinologist, naming the schools he had attended, and stating, "I’m highly educated." He is the father of four children in the Guilderland School District, ranging in age from 14 to 8.

His 13-year-old son, Dan, is in seventh grade and is struggling.
"For many years, my wife and I knew Dan was falling through a hole in reading," said Gerety, while his teachers said he was "making progress."

He and his wife didn’t know if their son was attaining grade level, Gerety said.
"Some of the fault surely lies with us," he said. "We have had a degree of blind faith" in the schools.

Dan’s struggles, he said, were not due to his parents failure to read to him or failure to label items at home, nor due to a lack of effort.
Four years ago, when a member of the community asked the board to look at the reading program, Gerety said, "We saw small changes...The fundamental approach to reading did not change."
He said he wished his son had been remediated by a "scientific method" not available in Guilderland.

Gerety said that roughly a quarter to a third of fourth-grade boys at Guilderland fail the state-required English language arts test.

Dan is now repeating seventh grade in a program at Shaker Junior High School designed specifically for dyslexic children, said Gerety, rather than being passed along to eighth grade as he would have at Guilderland.
"In the past," Gerety concluded, "the board has said they would not get involved...saying it was a curriculum issue...If the board did not let Danny fail, who did""

Board reacts

Towards the end of its three-hour public meeting, board members discussed the comments the parents had made at the start.
Hy Dubowsky said he was "very disturbed" by the "gut-wrenching stories."
"Where there’s smoke, there’s fire," said Dubowsky, adding that he would like to "see numbers," including the number of students getting remediation.
He said the district may need "a new way of doing business."
"Our next step is we want to have conversations with these parents...We need to get details," said Superintendent Gregory Aidala. He said he didn’t know if these complaints were emblematic of a bigger issue.
"I want the numbers," Dubowsky shouted, accusing the superintendent of playing to the television cameras. "These are not three isolated individuals and we all know it."
Making a reference to the state’s Freedom of Information Law, he went on about his request, "If it’s ignored, I’ll FOIL."
Board President Richard Weisz said he didn’t know if the numbers would be "FOIL-able or not."
"I think this is a greater issue than three parents," said board member Denise Eisele. "I would hope it is looked at as a global issue."

Both Eisele and Dubowsky were endorsed by Mirabile’s group, Guilderland Parents Advocate, in the 2006 school-board election. Mirabile said this week that her group has grown to about 300 members.

She also said that her son, who had initially struggled with reading, was tested last June, at the end of third grade, and was reading at a fifth-grade level.
"He got early intervention and outside help," she said. "That’s what we need for all kids." Mirabile went on, referring to the children of the parents who spoke Tuesday night, "Danny, Sean, and Jimmy, they’re the flip side of the coin."

Board member Colleen O’Connell chided Weisz for allowing the parents to speak about their children; she cited the board’s policy not to allow comments on individuals during the public session. It creates a lopsided view since the district is not allowed to respond about individual students, she said.
"I think a parent can speak for a child," said Weisz. He went on, "We need to be honest about when we can help kids and when we can’t help kids...."

Barbara Fraterrigo, who was the only board member in 2004 to support setting up an advisory panel on reading, outlined on Tuesday some information she would like, including the number of elementary-school students receiving academic intervention; the methods the district uses to teach students with dyslexia; what types of remediation are used; and how often children are tested.
Andress told the board that the requirements for remediation are set by the state. "In Guilderland, we often remediate far beyond those standards," she said.
Andress also said that special-education students now must pass the required tests, which she termed "a real challenge and difficulty and misfortune."

Board member Peter Golden asked how a student could graduate from high school while reading at the eighth-grade level.

Some special-education students receive an IEP diploma, Andress said, rather than a Regents diploma, which requires passing five state exams.
"I’m not interested in a witch hunt," said board Vice President John Dornbush. He went on, "I feel for these parents. I’ve been there myself...I don’t think the board level is the place to solve the problem."

Administrators offer answers
"It’s important to make a distinction between the reading program for the general population and the unique program these children needed," Andress told The Enterprise yesterday.

Many changes have been made in Guilderland’s reading program over the last few years, she said, both because of parental concerns and because of the state’s core curriculum for English language arts, published in 2005.

The district now addresses phonics, phonemic awareness, alphabet recognition, the motivation to read, and comprehensive strategies, she said, reeling off a long list.

The district, in recent years, she said, has offered more teacher training, sent teachers to conferences, engaged teachers in study groups, linked special-education teachers with regular classroom teachers, and focused heavily on the early school years.

For the past two summers, Guilderland has offered kindergarten intervention to get children off to a good start, Andress said.
"What we really do in this district, when children appear to have problems, is we try to build a program to meet those individual needs," said Andress. A child-study team at each school develops the programs, she said.
Asked about the parents’ complaints that they couldn’t tell how their children stood in relation to peers or their grade level, Andress said, "We’ve tried to do more assessment, collecting samples of student work. To get a handle on student progress."
"Progress is measured on an ongoing basis, not just once a year," said Hadden. Progress for students with disabilities, he said, is measured individually "in small increments."
"These are students with severe disabilities," he said. "Some students will never be able to read at grade level."

Asked about the required tests, and the performance of Guilderland students, Andress said that the federal No Child Left Behind legislation required that all but 1 percent of students at any given grade level be tested.
"Children with significant disabilities must now take the same test as their peers," she said. "Last year, New York State allowed off-level testing. The federal government has said we can’t do that."
She went on, "It has nothing to do with our expectations. We have high expectations for all of our students."
Hadden said that valuable time must now be spent teaching skills for assessment, "throwing out other skills that are important."
"You don’t want special-education classes to become test prep classes," said Andress. "These students need life skills."

Since two of the parents who spoke Tuesday night to the board said their sons were dyslexic, The Enterprise asked Hadden how Guilderland dealt with that disability.
"We don’t use the term dyslexic," he said. "It sets up a lack of expectation." Some Guilderland students with "a significant reading disability," he said, are sent out of the district for programs specific to their needs.

Others, Hadden said, are mainstreamed and receive remedial instruction with trained teachers.
"We offer a continuum of services," said Hadden, "that are modified as we go along."

Haley’s son, for example, was in a class of 10 students, said Hadden.

Asked about Baldwin’s criticism of the district for not letting her son repeat a grade, Andress said decisions on holding back a child are made on a case-by-case basis.
"Keeping a child from his peers often doesn’t benefit a child in the long run," said Hadden.

Andress cited research that showed some children compared being held back a grade to the death of a parent.

Andress said that, in response to Tuesday’s comments, she has asked teachers to develop a profile on each child to go over with the board, explaining the range of services the children have used.
"It appears to be quite a bit," she said. "We’ll really do some self-examination. This was a big impact to our teachers"I have so much respect for what they do to help all of our children."

Both administrators emphasized the availability of staff.
"We want parents to be partners in their children’s learning," said Andress.
"Our door is always is open," said Hadden.