The Dyslexia Community

My family was fortunate to spend the past weekend at a nearby Amusement Park which is known for thrilling rides, family fun and well, for being so over the top expensive that really I cant stand to think about how much it all cost.

The young folks all had a great time and I had a great time watching them have a great time.  So in that way it was clearly worth it, but it bothers me that every aspect of these parks are priced as high as possible.

Still, I saw an interesting way to handle this. I've seen this before only this time I actually noticed it. There are often groups, usually church groups, wearing the same tee shirts and clearly looking fantastically happy to be having a fun day of amusement, and why not, it's a place for family fun.

It is prohibitively expensive to take a family to one of these places, yet if a group such as one of these goes together as a "youth group experience" then it's much easier for more people to afford it. 

They might, for example, take a church bus,  pack their own sub sandwiches to be eaten as a group in a picnic area at a specific time thereby avoiding the $10.00 cheeseburger and disgusting frozen French fries I ended up having.

The group might also have fundraisers, like a bake sale or car wash to help finance the trip.  It makes a lot of sense to operate this way and I applaud these groups for their effectiveness. They set a goal and reached it.  Everyone had a good time and the personal expense to each individual family was greatly limited by the effort of a community of people working together.

So this good example lead me into new idea territory with dyslexia. 

I've tried to get a group together in my district, like so many suburban districts have, yet there have been no takers.  Although I know people in my district who have dyslexic children, and those children are not getting what they need to learn to read, truthfully my district doesn't have the same overall knowledge or socio-economic power that the suburban districts which are starting to see some (small at this point) changes being made have.  The parents in my district may also not have the same expectations that a typical suburban parent has.

Yet, I know a lot of people around this area with dyslexic children.  Many of us have the same concerns, our expectations of what school should be providing to our children and the paths that we have taken.  I think that perhaps I need to go back and revisit this,  to try again to build a community or plug into one that isn't district specific.