Students with Reading Disorders Sue Berkeley Unified School Dist.

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Four unnamed students, through their legal guardians, are the plaintiffs in a proposed class action lawsuit alleging the Berkeley (California) Unified School District and some of its top-level officials effectively failed “for years” to “timely identify and appropriately serve” children who suffer from dyslexia and other reading disorders.

Filed on behalf of all children with reading disorders enrolled in the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD), the 60-page lawsuit argues that although neurological reading disorders are treatable—“so long as students with reading disorders are properly and timely identified,” the case says—the defendants have allegedly systematically declined to identify, evaluate and provide appropriate tools and accommodations to students with reading challenges.

“When students with reading disorders are identified early and provided the appropriate interventions and accommodations, they can progress through school with their peers and even excel,” the lawsuit reads. “The number of talented members of society we stand to lose because BUSD is simply unwilling to exert the time and resources necessary to identify students with reading disorders and provide the services and accommodations required for them to learn how to read is untenable.”

The complaint goes on to allege BUSD and the individual defendants’—Superintendent Donald Evans and board of education directors Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, Ty Alper, Judy Appel, Josh Daniels and Karen Hemphill—failures in helping students with reading disabilities are long-standing and, worse, violations of the students’ fundamental rights under state and federal laws.

“BUSD systematically fails to abide by these obligations,” the case continues. “As a threshold problem, BUSD makes no coordinated effort to identify students with suspected reading disorders. Rather, BUSD generally treats all struggling readers the same, and takes insufficient steps to determine why they are struggling, e.g., due to a reading disorder or some other reasons.”

A step further, the lawsuit alleges the defendants’ one-size-fits-all approach toward helping reading-challenged students, as well as their alleged habit of discouraging parents from requesting reading evaluations for their children, has had a devastating and quantifiable impact on students’ lives.

“In short,” the case scorns, “[the defendants] have not only failed, they have actively condemned this class of students, as those before, to deprivation of their rights, ongoing academic struggle, social stigmatization, and a high risk of failure, over and over again.”