The Building Didn’t Catch It
Post One of Seven: What you’re actually paying for when you pay for a campus
This just happened: a parent messaged me at 3 AM. Her son’s school - beautiful campus, international reputation, tuition that could cover a mortgage - had just told her they thought her eight-year-old might have dysgraphia. He is confusing letters. His spelling is not great. He keeps forgetting to capitalize.
I’m his online reading tutor. I work with him twice a week from a different continent through a screen.
Here’s what I knew that the school didn’t: every single error they flagged could be explained by the fact that this kid is trilingual, actively building literacy in two different alphabets, and navigating three sets of spelling and capitalization rules simultaneously.
The letter confusion they were worried about? Predictable cross-script interference. The capitalization issue? His home language doesn’t capitalize the same things English does. The spelling? He’s coming from a phonetically transparent language and trying to crack the code of English, which is anything but.
His errors weren’t random. They were patterned, predictable, and explainable which is actually evidence against a learning disability, not for one.
The school has a building. I have a linguistics degree, structured literacy training, twenty years of experience with multilingual learners, and four months of data on this specific child.
The school proposed an assessment normed on monolingual English speakers for a trilingual kid and they don’t appear to have anyone on staff who would know how to interpret the results.
But they have the building. So they have the credibility.
We need to talk about that.
Next in the series: what you’re actually paying for when you pay for a campus