Dyslexia runs through our family with several young people affected. They are all bright kids but have struggled at school. Actually recieving the diagnosis of dyslexia was very positive as the kids ( and parents ) could understand why they where struggling and take steps to address the problem. A couple of the kids have had a lot of parental support, along with private tutors and one has just started uni.
Our son has also found school very difficult. We have had him to numerous health proffesionals and spent $800 to have an educational physcologist do a complete assesment of him. She IQ tested him and found he was in the top 20% of the population for IQ, but had Dysgraphia. This is very similar to dyslexia but affects his ability to write down his thoughts, rather than reading. The words just get scrambled somewhere between his brain and his hand. ( not very helpfull for school. ) He also has a bag full of other conditions such as auditory processing disorder, anxiety, symptoms of autism spectram and occasional periods of physcosis.
Conditions such as dyslexia can often, ( but not always ) be associated with other mental health problems, so it may pay to keep an eye out for other problems such as anxiety. It has taken two years of ongoing visits to numerous proffesionals to get an understanding of his conditions.
With his high IQ our son was able to manage school quite well until around year ten, but as subjects became more complex he become disengaged from school and eventually began to skip the classes he struggled in. Once this began, we took the difficult decision to remove him from school on his 16th birthday. We could see things where not going well and had worked with the school to give our son a number of extra work experience opportunities and had encouraged him to look at various vocational opportunities, so there had been quite a bit of preperation work done before he left school.
He had a part time job at KFC which he enjoyed. In the two months since leaving school, KFC have taken him on as a permenant employee. They have signed him up to a certificate 3 retail traineeship and are giving him around 30-35 hours work per week. KFC are also giving him greater responsability and are working towards using him to train other young employees. He plans to do courses in bartender and coffee barristering to provide further opportunities to work in the hospitality industry post KFC.
He also helps me in our sheep grazing business and has his own small sheep flock. He is saving money, working hard, undertaking short courses in TAFE and has basically bloomed since leaving school. In his spare time he writes and plays music, does photography, has restored an old VW kombi for his first car and just hangs out with his mates.
We dont know what the future holds for our son, but believe that school just wasnt working for him. The path he is travelling is not the conventional one for a young person, but he is doing something constructive and is happier now than he has been for a very long time. There may not be a cure for kids with these conditions, but if they learn to manage and live with them, they can still have a bright and positive future.
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