NYS Education Department to establish center for dyslexia and dysgraphia to help students

Dinorah Dellacamera said her son was in first grade when he was diagnosed with dyslexia 

Educators initially said her son would never learn to read or write at grade level. But after investing thousands of dollars on a trained literacy tutor, she said her son, now in eighth grade, is on the honors list and in advanced classes.

“Now he's doing great. He's reading at grade level, probably above grade level, and he's excelling," Dellacamera said.

While Dellacamera was able to provide her son with the resources he needed, she and other advocates on Long Island say schools must do more to help students. They are hopeful that recently-announced plans to open a Center for Dyslexia and Dysgraphia in the state Education Department will be a gamechanger for the Island.

Gov. Kathy Hochul earlier this month signed legislation to establish the center. The governor said in a release that the center will “create a statewide approach for collecting and sharing best practices, set standards for universal screening in K-5th grade and for new entrants and establish evidence-based interventions and teacher training." The center will also be tasked with creating a guidebook that would cover issues such as legal responsibilities and "effective Individual Education Program development and accommodations," Hochul said.

Advocates on Long Island hailed the news, saying that the region’s patchwork system of dealing with both learning conditions, from screening to resources, needs to be more uniform. The center, they hope, will help in both the education of teachers to support students with dyslexia and dysgraphia and in providing resources for struggling kids.

Dellacamera, a licensed veterinarian who sat on the New York State Dyslexia Task Force, which in December 2024 recommended the creation of the center, hopes it will also serve as a clearinghouse for information, among other things.

Navigating the special education system

According to the American Psychiatric Association, dyslexia and dysgraphia are “neurodevelopmental disorders that are typically diagnosed in early school-aged children, although may not be recognized until adulthood.” Dyslexia impairs a person’s ability to read while dysgraphia affects a person’s ability to write by hand. The disorders can be mild, moderate or severe.

While the specific number of children with dyslexia and dysgraphia is not tracked in New York, the state Education Department said more than half a million students received special education services in the 2024-25 academic year and nearly 150,000 school-aged students were reported to have learning disabilities.

Dellacamera, who serves on the board of the nonprofit Teach My Kid To Read, has been helping families with children diagnosed with dyslexia navigate the state's system of special education — both in terms of getting a diagnosis and in securing resources. Too often, Dellacamera and other advocates said, parents have a hard time securing the appropriate educational resources for their children.

Barbara Vivolo, co-founder of Decoding Dyslexia New York State, said that more than a decade ago her daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia while in third grade and she struggled to obtain services in her Suffolk school district.

“She lost her passion for learning...because they didn’t have the proper reading programs in place,” Vivolo said. 

By sixth grade, Vivolo said she was forced to enroll her daughter in a school in upstate Dutchess County that served students with dyslexia and other language disabilities. It has since closed.

Vivolo hopes the state center will help equip schools with necessary training so that all schools have an instructor trained in the best methods to teach students with the learning conditions. 

“They’re really bright, they're smart, but if you fail in the elementary then you fail in middle school, and then you fail in high school, and then you fail in the college, and then you try to and then you fail in the workforce,” Vivolo said of kids with dyslexia and dysgraphia.

Larry Leaven, Nassau BOCES district superintendent, said he is excited to hear about the center.  

“I think for Long Island, what I believe that it creates is like a framework for creating consistency, clarity and support, regardless of where you live in this state, so that people have a clear understanding for identification and for intervention,” he said. Some schools, he said, might hire new trained instructors or provide professional development for current teachers. 

Science of reading 

Many advocates favor the science of reading approach championed by Hochul last year, which includes the use of phonics or sounding out words.

A different reading curriculum known as the balanced literacy approach, which was once endorsed by educator Lucy Calkins at Columbia’s Teachers College, has gone out of favor but according to Dellacamera, some schools may still use it. The method includes teaching children to guess words based on pictures. 

“Dyslexics require more repetition...They just need to be taught in ways that are consistent with cognitive science of how the brain learns to read,” Dellacamera said.

Concetta Russo, an educator who represents the Long Island Branch of the International Dyslexia Association, said children excel faster with individual instruction, which is not always available in schools due to the cost.

“When they put five kids in a group, that's where it falls apart. No one disabled kid is like the other disabled kid. Even though you may have the same classification, they're all different," Russo said. 

She also said that diagnostic testing for these specific learning disabilities needs to be standardized, because there are currently too many different tests. 

"Long Island, anywhere, should standardize that diagnosis. I think that's going to be the challenge," she said.