Dleyxisa is the msot commoc lriaeng bisatility.

Tricky, no? Let’s try that again.

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability.

People with dyslexia — including roughly 60 million Americans — do not literally see words differently. Instead they experience a range of roadblocks to traditional language decoding. Dyslexia manifests in a multitude of ways: Words might skip, sounds don’t always line up with writing and letters can reverse in the mind.

Absent specialized instruction, students with dyslexia often sour on school, feeling unintelligent. Dropout rates rise which bring up incarceration rates too.

According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, around one in five Americans has dyslexia.

Students with dyslexia are three times more likely to drop out of school, per The National Center for Learning Disabilities, and studiesshow the rate of dyslexia in prisons exceeds the national average.

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month and a proliferation of new research illuminates how the condition works in the brain. Armed with this science, educators know how to unlock students’ full potential. Legislation now promotes early intervention, and Asheville is home to one of North Carolina’s most prominent dyslexia learning centers.

Yet with a significant shortage of trained teachers, educators in North Carolina and nationwide say implementation of best practices still lags. The gap between research and practice leaves many students, particularly those from low-income families, most at risk.

Taking detours rather than highways

In recent years, MRI scans have pinpointed dyslexia as a neurobiological condition in which people process words in atypical parts of the brain.

This neurological difference does not prevent comprehension but makes reading, writing and spelling cumbersome.

“It's just not as automatic,” said Monica McHale-Small, consultant with the International Dyslexia Association. “It’s like you're taking detours, instead of just taking the highway.”

Research estimates 80% of all learning disabilities are a form of dyslexia. The condition is genetic and never goes away.

While dyslexia presents challenges, studies suggest it enhances aptitudes in other areas. Individuals with dyslexia often display strong spatial and narrative intelligence, Pablo Picasso and Agatha Christie being prime examples. A 2007 study from the Cass Business School in London also found 35% of entrepreneurs in the United States were dyslectic. The determination required to learn with the condition may serve people well in all fields.

But students may never reach professional success if they grow discouraged in school, interpret their dyslexia as a lack of intelligence and dropout.

'Your dyslexia bit ya'

In 1998, Diane Milner started a specialized learning center for students with learning disabilities at Carolina Day School in South Asheville. This year, the Key School enrolls 105 students, from second to eighth grade. Most attend with dyslexia.

“It doesn't have to be handicap at all,” said Milner, a former teacher. “It's just understanding what you need."

Before attending the school, students frequently developed tactics to obscure their dyslexia. Rylee Pratt would pretend to read picture books alongside her twin sister. Jackson Collyer and Audrey Alexander politely asked teachers if they could read to themselves rather than aloud. Jack Mosley turned into a class clown every time his turn came up to read.

“At the time you think dyslexia is like this bad thing that you have,” said Alexander, who is now in eighth grade with Collyer, Pratt and Mosley at the Key School. All four students said they used to find school frustrating.

Milner and her staff disabuse students of any shame linked to their learning disability.

“So many kids come to us, they're hiding their work,” Miler said. “They're writing so tiny that we couldn't possibly read it. We’re kind of on to all those tricks.”

Instructors readily highlight the reason every student is there. “Your dyslexia bit ya,” quipped third-grade reading teacher Tamara Rutledge after the student flipped a “b” for a “d" during a recent lesson.

Brains of students with dyslexia can be rewired to better process phonics (associations between sounds and letters) and decode written words. To retrain the brain, the Key School applies the Orton-Gilligham approach, centered on 12 principles including systematic phonics, direct instruction and multisensory lessons. “It's a real systemized process,” Milner said.

In multisensory, teachers trace letters on student’s arms. Students breakdown word spellings with taps of their fingers. Even on the doorstep of high school, the eighth-graders still recall the ditties they heard in lower grades about math facts and word orders.

It is common for students to carry these strategies into adulthood, air tracing words in university libraries and tapping their fingers below boardroom tables.

High cost and demand

Greater awareness of dyslexia has brought a greater demand for dyslexia instruction. “The phone keeps ringing,” Milner said. “It's a tremendous need.”

It is also a tremendous cost. Tuition at the Key School is $39,400 a year. While Carolina Day gives some form of financial assistance to a third of its students, advocates say dyslexia education is inaccessible to thousands.

Including the Key School, there are four dyslexia-specific schools in North Carolina, all private.

“They're for wealthy affluent families," said Kris Cox, executive director of ReadWS, a Winston-Salem based organization promoting multisensory literacy instruction. “There are zero dyslexia-specific public schools.”

Whether dyslexia instruction scales beyond the few private schools is a lingering question.

In 2017, the General Assembly passed a bill mandating more robust screenings for dyslexia in public schools as well as ongoing training for teachers. About half of North Carolina counties have a dyslexia delegate, designated by the state Department of Public Instruction to address persistent student reading difficulties in their geographic areas by promoting some of the same interventions present at the Key School.

“Continuing to bridge the gap between research and practice is the biggest thing that we need to accomplish, because the research really is robust,” said Matt Hoskins, assistant director for Exceptional Children at NCDPI. “It's just ensuring that the science of reading makes its way to every classroom.”

To deliver best practices to all students, trained teachers are needed in a quantity many say does not exist.

“Not having the instructors is a huge obstacle,” McHale-Small said. She says university teacher training programs must better prioritize multisensory techniques.

Not waiting for colleges to provide qualified teachers, Milner created her own.

“It took me about two years of this school to realize I needed a teacher training center because we were just growing and growing and growing,” she said.

The Key Learning Center continues to train instructors for the Key School, as well as for public, private and home schools. Multisensory instruction is central. Over two decades, Milner estimates the center has reached more than two thousand teachers.

Milner acknowledges an urgency. She knows the correlations between dyslexia, dropouts and the prison population. She knows the learning disability unnecessarily places a ceiling on the potential of millions when not addressed.

"This has big implications for society," she said. “Reading is the ticket out."