In Texas’ Brownsville Independent school district, the vast majority of the 35,000 students are Hispanic, many are bilingual, and some are dyslexic.
The district wants to see all students learn to read and write, regardless of language. To do so, schools screen students for dyslexia when they arrive and determine which language is their most dominant.
From there, students are put into either the district’s English dyslexia program or its Spanish dyslexia program. Students in the Spanish program are pulled out in small groups for their “dyslexia lab” and start by learning their Spanish letters and letter sounds through the Esperanza curriculum before ultimately transitioning into learning to read and write in English.
In this video, students who started in the Spanish curriculum have moved on to read and write in English.
