This FAQ provides information about dyslexia and how Portland Public Schools will be providing support and guidance to families and teachers in meeting the needs of students with dyslexia.

Our current process for screening for learning difficulties including dyslexia is through the use of our universal screener, MAP Reading Fluency in grades K-2, as it assesses the measures that are successful in identifying a student’s areas of need. The areas are: phonological awareness which includes phoneme segmentation and blending, rapid naming, and letter sound association.

There could be several different reasons why a child gets identified as high risk on the screener including a need for additional instruction in one of the 5 Essential Reading Components; Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Comprehension, Vocabulary, and Fluency. In order to determine the specific lagging skill, diagnostic assessments may be administered to further understand the need. Once the lagging skill is determined, then extra instruction in a 1:1 or small group setting specific to skill needs will be administered over a 6-8 week time period.

Every school in PPS has a Student Intervention Team (SIT), which is a group of teachers and leaders who work together to support a teacher who may have a student showing academic or behavior needs. We suggest contacting your child's teacher to learn more about the plan they have put into place to address your student's reading concern and whether the SIT has supported them. They can also provide you tips on how you can support at home with the instructional materials we have, aligned to the science of reading.

All students in PPS are screened for reading risk across grades K-2. This includes students enrolled in a dual language program and multilingual students. We screen in the language of instruction and also in English when appropriate. All assessment tools are considered if a child is in need of additional reading support.

Students are screened through second grade with MAP Fluency, but also screened with another tool called MAP Growth through 8th grade. We also administer curriculum-specific tests to guide instruction and support. If your student is in a grade higher than second grade and you are worried they aren't reading at grade level, contact your child’s teacher to express these concerns. The teacher will work with the school principal and school team to determine the next steps for supporting the student.

Dyslexia is a significant reading disability in people with normal intelligence. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. Students with dyslexia often experience difficulties with both oral and written and other language skills, such as writing, and pronouncing words and writing.

The exact causes of dyslexia are still not completely clear, but brain imagery studies show differences in the way the brain of a person with dyslexia develops and functions. Dyslexia has been found to be hereditary. Moreover, most people with dyslexia have been found to have difficulty with identifying the separate speech sounds within a word and/or learning how letters represent those sounds, a key factor in their reading difficulties. Dyslexia is not due to either lack of intelligence or desire to learn; with appropriate teaching methods, individuals with dyslexia can learn successfully.

The impact of dyslexia is different for each person and depends on the severity of the condition and the effectiveness of instruction or remediation. The core difficulty is with reading words and this is related to difficulty with processing and manipulating sounds. Some individuals with dyslexia manage to learn early reading and spelling tasks, especially with excellent instruction, but later experience their most challenging problems when more complex language skills are required, such as grammar, understanding textbook material, and writing essays.

The bill has three requirements for districts: to train a Dyslexia Advisor for each school with a Kindergarten or 1st grade classroom, to universally screen for risk factors of dyslexia in kindergarten (or first grade, if that is the child’s first year of school) and screen families for a family history of dyslexia when a student shows academic risk.

Training Requirement: More than 700 teachers in PPS have completed ODE-approved training in the last six years. Each PPS building has 1 or more trained teachers on staff.

Screening Requirements: The screening requirements first applied to the 2018-19 school year. Portland Public Schools utilized DIBELS with K-2 students to measure phonological awareness, blending, rapid naming skills, and letter/sound correspondences from 2012 through 2023. In the Fall of 2023, PPS moved to new ODE-approved tool, MAP Reading Fluency. Families of students who show risk on our screeners and curriculum-embedded assessments are contacted in Winter or Spring to fill out a family history checklist to screen for a family history of dyslexia.