Things that have been beneficial:
Hire an advocate for your IEP meetings and to help draft your IEP. Think of these individuals as having some special insight into which districts are willing to budge on topics and how they're willing to budge. Remember, this is a repeat game for school districts. They manage hundereds of special education contracts every year and they get good at how to handle parents. This was our first time at trying to work with a school district. Advocates are like having someone that's done this once (50x) before and can give you advice on what to do/say.
Invest in audible books. My wife is also dyslexic although no one ever identified her as dyslexic as a kid. Reading takes a lot of the pleasure out of literature for them but audio books have been a game changer. Get a libby membership and connect it to the public library (local and New York City). Audible is also a great tool- we have used all the credits for the largest audible subscription for years. It’s not free like libby but knowing that it makes the difference between them being able to “read” and not makes it easier to eat that annual fee.
If you’re going to read one book on dyslexia, I would take a look at the dyslexic advantage – one of the main cultures we’ve tried to instill in our house is that dyslexia is a different wiring of her brain. It’s not “bad wiring” but different. It is really obvious to my wife and daughter that they are poor readers relative to the “normal” but no one has ever sat them down and articulated what they are better at because of their brain wiring. At first it was really hard to articulate what the “good” part of that wiring was until I ran into this book. Not being dyslexic, its been really eye opening to talk about this with my wife and daughter.
Give up on trying to be a good reader. Our daughter went through years of private tutoring and intense in school remediation and around 6th grade we made a strategic choice to lean into becoming really good at using technology to bridge her reading gap instead of trying to continue to remediate her reading ability. I don’t know that this is the right choice for everyone. Our daughter is only 18 so if I’m honest, it’s a little like looking at a cake that is baking in the oven – you think its going well but hard to say. I do know for our daughter this made a big difference. She uses Kurzweil 3000 to read all her technical content and heavy reading courses. All her materials have to be digitized. The pandemic helped with this but that can be a constant fight with the school district here in Texas – New York was easier – they were willing to allocate resources to ensure things were digitized. There are big differences in text-to-speech technology. Don’t let your school district use bad (free/cheap) software. You can point out deficiencies repeatedly and push them toward a functioning product.
You’re going to have some teachers that don’t get it and will be a problem. You can usually pick them out within the first month of the school year. You have to address them head on because for some teachers, they don’t understand being dyslexic. Warning signs like ignoring IEP provisions, not taking the time to make sure accommodations are met can quickly clue you into who these teachers are. As we’ve gotten into higher grades, you rotate teachers 1-2 times a year. The cycle to address any issues will always be long enough that you can’t usually get rid of these teachers after you hit middle school.
I think dyslexics suffer academic death by 1000 cuts. For our daughter, by the time she hit middle school, she would have 6-8 teachers a year. Even with well intending teachers, there is a learning curve every August/September to try and get them to meet her accommodations. What that means to the student is that teacher A may have an issue on Monday and teacher B on Wednesday…etc. It gets exhausting to find the rhythm every academic year and trying to keep our daughter encouraged got tough as she got further into high school.