Her son, J. Ryan Mathurin, wasn’t always comfortable pronouncing words in English. But Joseph, a Haitian immigrant raising him by herself, did not know how far behind he was in reading — in the 30th percentile — until a hospital where her son was receiving treatment connected her with a bilingual advocate.
“Parents can’t solve a problem that they don’t know they have,” said Cindi Williams, co-founder of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit dedicated to improving communication between public schools and parents about student academic progress. The struggles that ultimately brought J. Ryan to the hospital for mental health treatment began in third grade, when he returned to in-person school after nearly a year of studying online. His teacher called frequently, sometimes every day. J. Ryan was getting frustrated, disrupting lessons and leaving the classroom.
The advocate, Fabienne Eliacin, pushed to get J. Ryan’s scores from the tests given each fall to monitor student learning. She explained to Joseph what it meant to be scored in the 30th percentile. It’s not good, Eliacin told her. He can do better. “Historically, teachers did not get a lot of training to talk to parents,” said Tyler Smith, a school psychology professor at the University of Missouri. School leadership and support for teachers also make a difference, he said.