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learning differences

Why Kids with Dyslexia Need Specialized Schools to Thrive: An Interview with Kevin Pendergast, Head of School at The Kildonan School

“Your child should attend a school specific to language disabilities or consider the home-schooling option.”  Families like ours receive this type of recommendation all the time, and it is a life-changer. Perhaps you work full-time, or you know that you and your kid are not a good fit for a home-school scenario. You may not have ever thought about a specialized school or considered the logistical and cost factors. Your child has not been progressing in a typical school environment, and you know they are smart, so the recommendation is not a shock. It’s merely a wake-up call for a reality you were not ready to face. That was our story. To get our daughter the reading services she needed, last April we drove to The Kildonan School in Amenia, New York, to learn whether our daughter would be a fit. As previous blogs have described, our daughter attended the summer camp, Camp Dunnabeck, for six weeks, and made unprecedented progress. For kids with reading issues who have not demonstrated improvement in a traditional school system, private schools for language issues are the difference between thriving versus not finishing high school or graduating with limited choices. For this post, I am proudly interviewing Kevin Pendergast, esq., who is Head of School at The Kildonan School. What are the major differentiating… | Read More »Why Kids with Dyslexia Need Specialized Schools to Thrive: An Interview with Kevin Pendergast, Head of School at The Kildonan School

Dyslexia and Adoption: Let’s Connect the Dots

It’s dyslexia awareness month. As such, I would be remiss in continuing our story without mentioning adoption, particularly international adoption. What about adoption and dyslexia, or learning differences for that matter? Where is the research, and why isn’t adoption cited more frequently as a subgroup within the broader dyslexia community? Maybe it would over-complicate a very challenging educational space, or possibly most people have no idea that such a high percentage of adopted children, especially those adopted internationally, are dyslexic. If only we knew. Statistical and Empirical Evidence of High Rates of Dyslexia in Adopted Children The first person who told us that our daughter would have a learning difference was our adoption attorney. Go figure. While preparing some adoption paperwork, she indicated that our daughter would not get through college in four years—if she went at all. I was insulted. How dare she stereotype our perfect child! Because she had worked with internationally-adopted children her entire career and since our daughter came to us at around the age of two, the attorney predicted our daughter would have some type of learning difference. We knew we would prove the attorney wrong, but sadly, we didn’t. What I learned is that in 2014 alone 110,373 kids were adopted through foster care, and domestic and international adoption (Jones and Placek, 2017). Kids… | Read More »Dyslexia and Adoption: Let’s Connect the Dots