Wayne Knowland graduated from a Bronx high school in June, and was given a standard 8-by-6-inch New York City Department of Education diploma. It’s exactly like the diploma tens of thousands of other kids got — except Wayne can’t read his.

In fact, the charismatic 18-year-old can’t read street signs, a paragraph in a newspaper or a job application — despite educators at Fannie Lou Hamer HS sending him on his way with a handshake and a sheepskin.

Wayne graduated just three weeks after the school gave him an evaluation on June 6 that determined he was reading at a second-grade level.

Incredibly, his graduation date and lousy reading skills are documented pages apart in a packet signed by two Fannie Lou Hamer staffers and a district representative.

“I feel like I was cheated of my education,” said Knowland, who works part-time at the Children’s Aid Society and is fighting to receive further schooling. “It hurts inside, because I have to deal with it every day.”

Knowland’s stepfather, Jay Olmeda, is now appealing to the Department of Education in a bid to secure hundreds of hours of costly private tutoring for Wayne.

“They’ve known since the third grade he was having problems and for so many years it just got pushed aside,” Olmeda said.

Diagnosed with a learning disability in the third grade, Wayne was never held back. The end of so-called “social promotion” came too late for him, and kids with learning delays are often exempt from the policy.

He was only required to pass three tests — called reading, writing and math RCTs — in order to graduate with a standard high-school diploma.

It took him four attempts to pass the writing test and seven tries to pass the math test.

Wayne says it was only because he had questions read to him on his fifth stab at the reading test — in apparent violation of testing rules — that he passed that exam.

Olmeda — who just recently re-entered Wayne’s everyday life — said the teen had been offered little extra help beyond instruction in a smaller class with 15 students.

“Why was this allowed to happen?” fumed Olmeda, who casts blame all the way up to Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein for pressuring schools to raise their graduation rates at any cost.

“This is the increase in graduation rate right here,” he said. “He graduated, but he shouldn’t have graduated.”

He said Wayne’s mother, who is dealing with her own issues, wasn’t able to support her son academically at home.

A Department of Education spokesman said the city was committed to improving the education of students with disabilities, but that it “does not set local diploma standards, the state does. Students who meet those state standards receive local diplomas.”

And yet, the DOE is using Wayne’s worthless diploma to justify not giving him any more assistance.

“It is the Department’s contention that the student’s eligibility under [federal law] has terminated due to his graduation in June 2009,” wrote DOE special-education administrator Cynthia Rodriguez in a letter to a hearing officer.

Fannie Lou Hamer principal Nancy Mann declined comment, citing Olmeda’s legal petition for more services.

But state Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch challenged the idea that any student reading at a second-grade level could pass the RCTs without help.

“It is not plausible to me. It doesn’t make sense,” she told The Post.

Olmeda’s lawyer, Nelson Mar, is challenging the DOE’s stance on similar grounds.

He said Wayne likely managed to get as far as he did in school simply because he’s such a likable kid.

“If the child is generally liked by the school, they try not to make a big deal about the academic delays,” said Mar, of Legal Services NYC-Bronx. “With the kids they don’t like, they push them out.”

yoav.gonen@nypost.com

