Our Boys Needed Phonics – The Public Schools Didn’t Use It

July 4, 2024

At the teacher conference, it was suggested that our son be evaluated for learning disabilities. So the evaluation commenced, and it was signed on the last day of school that year. Our son, with an IQ of 123, couldn’t read at grade level. Why? – he lacked phonemic awareness and phonics. Of the 16 recommendations, there was only one obscure recommendation to increase phonics. I went to the school and asked if there were any spelling books or phonics books available. There were none!

We believed our children needed to know how to read and write. We found a school that taught these skills, so we transferred our sons to a small private school. A few months later, I found that there was provision for reassignment, and that reassignment “included but was not limited to the public school.” WOW! This language, according to the Special Council for the State Board of Education, was put into the law so as not to limit the districts in providing for their students (this language has since been removed from the statute). We applied for both our sons to be reassigned and were denied. Appropriations were withheld from my students. We became non-citizens, stripped of a basic provision available to all students in the state. That was in 2009.

In 2009, RSA 193:3, the reassignment provision, was not well known. However, these provisions have been codified since the late 1800s. Kids not getting along in the assigned school is not new, but what is apparent is the influence of the public school’s ideas and curriculums to influence the population of our country. School district superintendents also seem to have an unending supply of disposable income to hire lawyers to defend their positions at the State Board. The choice of what to teach and what not to teach is determined by school administrations. Generations have been subtly influenced and manipulated. The reading curriculum abandoning phonics for “sight reading” the “Bradley Method” or whatever it is now called is a case in point.

I have requested tuition from elementary school through private high school. Our sons were in and out of public and private schools. Each time they went to private school, they repeated a grade and when they went back to public school, they were advanced a grade. Special Ed evaluations for both showed each possessed a high intelligence quotient, yet they could barely read. This is why we made the decision to find education options that better equipped our sons and aligned with our beliefs. When the school years were done, between the two students, we paid for 13 years of private school. It was $273,000 or $21,000 per year, which is equivalent to a K-12 Education in the public school. $150,000 was for 3 years at boarding school, because that is what it took to save him.

Tanya McIntire