Education Week - August 18, 2021 - 14

The Pandemic Made It Harder to Spot Students
With Disabilities. Now Schools Must Catch Up
By Evie Blad
Kanisha Aikin had suspected her son, Carter,
might have dyslexia, but it wasn't until his Katy,
Texas, school closed in March 2020 that she was
certain.
Carter, then in 1st grade, quickly switched to remote
learning alongside millions of students around the
country as leaders struggled to contain the COVID-19
pandemic. That gave Aikin a rare chance to watch her
son's day-to-day learning experience up close.
As his virtual class did reading exercises, Carter
struggled to blend sounds together. Even after
seeming to master a word on one page of a book,
he failed to recognize the same word a few pages
later. Sometimes his frustration would lead to misbehavior
or a lack of focus. And his reading skills
were noticeably different from his classmates' and
even his younger sisters'.
" I was panicking, " Aikin said. " I thought, 'If we
don't do something quick, he's going to be in trouble.'
Regardless of the world shutting down, time was still
passing, and he was still going to have to go to 2nd
grade next year. "
Nationwide, 7.3 million students, around 14 percent
of all public school students, receive services under
the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the
nation's primary special education law. Policymakers
have sounded alarms about meeting those students'
needs during the pandemic, and some fear there are
children who need those services who haven't been
identified at all.
Parents and teachers are often the first to recognize
the signs of disabilities in students. That's especially
true of students with learning disabilities, whose
needs may not be as immediately obvious as those of
other students who need special education services.
And, during the pandemic, both parents and teachers
have faced significant interruptions that have made
recognizing those needs more difficult, educators told
Education Week.
Like Aikin, some families flagged concerns as they
supervised their children's participation in online lessons.
But many other parents-including those who
couldn't afford work interruptions-didn't have the
option of staying home to monitor their children's remote
learning or might not have recognized any subtle
issues as they emerged.
For teachers, extended periods of remote learning
or class time interrupted by frequent quarantines
robbed them of the small ordinary encounters
that can help them gauge students' progress: how
quickly children turn pages, how they engage with
peers, how they respond to frustrations with reading
and math exercises, even the appearance of their
handwriting, which may have been replaced by typing
into an online program.
Those dynamics combine with other challenges to
form a perfect storm for schools as they seek to return
to normal: They must work to separate which students
need assessments for learning disabilities and which
children's academic struggles can be attributed to the
ordinary fidgeting and grimacing that comes with
learning in front of a computer.
Educators must work to recognize concerns that may
have gone unidentified and to prioritize which newfound
parental concerns are the most urgent. Many will
do so with less data from classroom assessments and
statewide exams than they would have in a typical year.
And they will tackle those needs as they also strain to
accommodate heightened social and emotional stress
for all students after an unprecedented set of school
years.
" It's going to be really difficult to assess where
students are and to determine whether what we are
seeing is the result of a disability or a new baseline
14 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 18, 2021 | www.edweek.org
you need to slow down, " Williams-Hall said. " But that's
difficult to do during virtual learning and the student
doesn't even have the camera on. "
Similarly, while a student with a behavioral disorder
or emotional disturbance may physically disengage
or seem defiant in an in-person classroom, that same
student may mute their microphone and ignore their
computer in remote learning, and it can be difficult for
educators to determine why they are absent from class
discussions, Williams-Hall said.
Even for teachers familiar with learning disabilities,
the sound quality and limitations of computer programs
may have made it difficult to recognize them last
year, said Teresa Ranieri, a teacher and literacy coach
at a New York City elementary school.
During online reading exercises, it could be difficult
to hear if a student was able to blend letter sounds together
to form words, to deconstruct words into indiCLOCKWISE
FROM TOP:
Kanisha Aikin listens to
her 8-year-old son,
Carter, who has dyslexia,
as he reads aloud in the
family's home in Katy,
Texas.
Carter picks out a book
from the Diary of a
Wimpy Kid series in
the family's home.
Carter shows off his
summer reading log.
for everyone, " said Meghan Whittaker, the director of
policy and advocacy for the National Center for Learning
Disabilities.
Looking for warning signs of disabilities
With a family history of dyslexia, Aikin said her
" radar was turned on very high " to warning signs for
her children. As she studied up on the special education
process, she enrolled Carter in a small private
program focused on reading instruction for the last
school year. After recently getting a formal evaluation
and diagnosis from her school district of dyslexia and
dysgraphia, a disability related to handwriting, she's
weighing her options for the 2021-22 school year.
But there may be many children showing similar
warning signs of disabilities that have gone undetected,
said Winnie Williams-Hall, an 8th grade special education
teacher in Chicago.
The early signals of disabilities can be very difficult
for parents, and even teachers, to recognize, she said.
And remote learning made that even more difficult for
educators.
" During in-person learning, you are face-to-face with
a student, and you can gauge facial expressions, when
vidual phonetic sounds, and to rhyme, she said.
" There's a delay, there may be poor internet connection,
and when all of the children say it at the same
time, it's very hard to hear them, " Ranieri said.
With a focus on science-based reading instruction,
Ranieri's school does universal assessments to gauge
students' reading skills and to determine who may
need more-targeted evaluation. But those assessments
were written to be administered in person, she said,
and it's difficult to measure how much online administration
affected the reliability of their results.
With parents' permission, Ranieri donned gloves and
a mask and went to twin students' home to evaluate
them in person last year.
" I was able to identify strengths and needs so much
more because I did it in person, " she said. " In my
mind I'm thinking, 'How can I go to everyone's home
to do this?' "
There's no federal year-over-year data on special
education evaluations, and states that tabulate such
information do not yet have information on the 202021
school year. But signs point to a decline. In Indiana,
for example, schools completed about 25,000 special
education evaluations during the 2019-20 school year,
which included the first few months of the pandemic.
Annie Mulligan for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - August 18, 2021

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