Illustration by Tabitha Walters
Good news for the one in five people who have difficulty processing written words: Michigan now has two strong laws governing how schools screen for dyslexia and train teachers to respond to it. And it has them largely because of Ann Arbor school board member and former special ed teacher Susan Ward Schmidt.
“In 2019 I retired, and I requested a bill from [state] representative Julie Brixie,” Schmidt explains. “And by chance, Julie and [state senator] Jeff Irwin were on the phone together. And I knew Jeff from East Lansing as well as here. He really has been our champion.”
Schmidt put together a committee of experts who wrote a four-bill package in the pandemic year of 2020. But “it came late in the session with not enough time to get it through both chambers,” she says. The following session, the bills got to the senate, but “the senator running the education committee was in a contentious race and didn’t want to bring it up.”
Last year, “we were told it would be lame duck, and we’re thinking, ‘This is gonna crash again,’” Schmidt says. “Then the latest [state education] test scores came out.” Michigan ranked forty-third in the country in English language arts, with just 41 percent of third-graders proficient. With that, “I think there was a new will from both parties to say, ‘We gotta do this!’”
Despite opposition from testing companies that feared losing business, the bills passed overwhelmingly in September. They will take effect in the 2027–28 school year.
“The third-grade reading law already says schools have to assess children three times a year,” Schmidt points out. “So all we’re saying is, when you do it three times a year, make sure you’re using an assessment that’s valid and reliable.”
With better assessments “we can intervene earlier,” she emails. “The earlier we help students struggling with decoding and encoding (spelling) skills, the better outcomes we will see with their reading and writing.”
She’s excited that Ann Arbor “had already started to bring in some of the programs” before the laws passed. She believes the AAPS has the potential to be the best in the state in helping students with dyslexia. “We’re moving. And it’s refreshing.”
