19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz, a student at UConn, hasn’t quite decided on her career path yet. She’s considering becoming a teacher, administrator or maybe a lawyer. But before that, she has to learn how to read and write.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jessika Harkay to discuss her article, “This Hartford Public High School grad can’t read. Here’s how it happened,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here.
WSHU: Hello, Jessika. You tell us about Aleysha, a 19-year-old high school senior in Hartford who told the Hartford City Council in May that she was never taught to read or write despite spending all her time in Hartford Public Schools since she was six years old. Is that what prompted you to dig deeper into the story?
JH: Yeah, so I was actually at that Hartford City Council meeting because of the budget issues they were having earlier this year, and so they had a rally that day with a bunch of friends, a bunch of family members, and they all came out to pretty much advocate that, ‘hey, we need more funding in this school system.’ Aleysha went up with one of her teachers, and she was just using really strong language; I was failed by this school district. You guys abandoned me. You let me down. And she ended up breaking into tears. The whole auditorium was crying.
And I said, there’s a story there. For a teenager to be talking that strongly about a school system. Something went wrong. So afterward, I chased her, and I was like, hey, like, I heard what you said. I think that there’s a story here. Can we talk further? So, it was the end of the school year around that time, and we met up at her high school. We went down to a classroom, and we were just talking, and she was like, Yeah, I don’t know how to read or write. And I said, ‘at all?’ I was shocked, and that’s where she told me the story.
WSHU: This is a 19-year-old who has been in school in Hartford since she was six years old, and she came over from Puerto Rico with her mother when she was five.
JH: Correct.
WSHU: So, was her entire education hard for public schools?
JH: Exactly. And she was a multilingual student. She was in special education courses, and she claims that her whole academic career, especially through elementary school, she just sat in the back of a regular classroom and told to do other tasks while other kids were learning to read and write. They were given books. They were doing basic math. She was asked just to draw pictures, clean bookshelves, and do things so she wouldn’t disrupt the class.
And so she went that way through well into middle school, and at that point, she was saying that she started to act out, mostly from being unable to communicate. She didn’t really speak the language, she didn’t know how to read, she didn’t know how to write, she wasn’t performing in school, and she began to have behavioral issues, is what she told me. Well into middle school, she wasn’t spending much time in a classroom at this point, because she was always in the principal’s office, and so it was just a snowball effect of never receiving instruction when she was younger, and then how that just continued to develop into her academic career.
WSHU: You touch on a very interesting aspect of her education here: She started using her phone to record lessons, play them back, and try to memorize them. Could you just explain that a little bit?
JH: Yeah, so because she didn’t know how to read or write, she wasn’t able to take physical notes, and so she ended up just trying to figure out, especially during the pandemic, where you don’t have a physical teacher in front of you, she would just start recording the lessons and say, I’ll just listen to it back so I can have something to refer to. That’s what she said she did all through her last year of middle school into her first few years of high school, and at that point, she was using Google Translate.
So she would print out a piece of paper with the lesson or her homework. On Google Translate, you take a picture, and it highlights the text for you. You can have it translated and read out loud to you. So she was speaking English at this point, but she was just using the translation service to be able to read that text out loud to her to understand what was being said on that written piece of paper.
WSHU: And she showed you her phone. She had up to 700 audio files on her phone.
JH: Yep, and a lot of those have been deleted, but when you use that audio file. It tells you, like, how many recordings you’ve done that thus far, right? So I think it was, like, 736 files. And I was like, so you have all 700? She’s like, Oh, no, I would not have any storage on my phone if I kept all of those because, at that point, she was recording our lessons six times a day.
WSHU: Now, Jessika, you spoke with administrators and other school officials. What did they say?
JH: Yeah. So the hard part about a story like this is no one really wants to have their name on the record just for retaliation purposes. So Aleysha was able to connect me with some staff that she remembered. I said, give me a list of everyone you remember in the school district you ever interacted with. And one of the most interesting conversations I had was with a paraeducator who had known her for several years, who had seen her when she was a child, was working in that same school, and ultimately was working in the high school when she went into the high school, and during that conversation, they were just telling me, like, Aleysha is not the only kid like this. We see it a lot in special education, where kids are just being passed through, but we also just see it in regular education, where students just get passed through. You can probably find other kids who are graduating without the ability to read or write.
WSHU: This is more than 30 years since the landmark education desegregation case in Connecticut, the Sheff v. O’Neill case, and a lot of state money has been spent to upgrade the Hartford school system in particular. So what are administrators saying? Where did they drop the ball?
JH: Yeah, I think the hard thing when we look at the Sheff case is the creation of magnet schools, and that a lot of money is being poured into these magnet schools, but may not be distributed equally among their traditional public schools. And so something, as I was looking at their budget earlier this year and talking to the superintendent, I was talking to the district just asking, where is all the money going? A lot of it is going to these magnet schools, having to pay these tuitions, and then not having those appropriate resources in your traditional public schools.
Another concern that they’ve been just begging the state legislature about is just special education costs and that reimbursement model and not being reimbursed properly for high special education costs, and where you’re seeing a large concentration of these students in these high need districts, like your Hartfords, your Bridgeports, your Waterburys, so you just see a lot of their revenue just being poured out of the district, either going to services for these children, or when that isn’t sufficient enough, you have to outsource these kids into different private programs. So we’re seeing a lot of just their money being poured out of the district, rather than being brought into it and focusing on these traditional schools where some of these high needs students end up staying.
WSHU: Well, let’s get back to Aleysha. Where does she go from here?
JH: Yeah, so right now, she has a lawyer, and they have filed for due process, and so they’re expected to go through mediation at the end of the month, and that is pretty much just going to be an agreement of what is the district going to take responsibility for? Whatever agreement ultimately comes to will probably be confidential and won’t be reported on. But the other aspect is that every time I had a conversation with her, she talked about how she wanted to go to college, wanted to be a teacher, wanted to be a superintendent, and maybe I wanted to be a lawyer. And those are pretty ambitious dreams for someone who doesn’t have the ability to read or write.
So I think the first step for her is, she did get accepted to UConn. She did do their summer program. They are aware that she doesn’t have these abilities. So the first step is really just getting those tutoring services to get her closer to those marks. And then again, it goes back to just what happens with the district. Will they be able to fund some of those services? Is there going to be a settlement? And that’s kind of the next step of the conversation. Right now, she is enrolled part-time at UConn. She’s taking two classes right now. She took, I think, four classes over the summer. So she has these dreams of wanting to be a successful adult. Has a career, but it’s just a matter of building the resources to get her there.