MONTEGO BAY — When teachers told Westmoreland businessman Trevor Swaby that his son was a stubborn, lazy dunce, he refused to believe. Instead, he saw parallels in the young boy’s difficulties at school and his own childhood struggles to perform in the classroom.

“Both me and my son, Trevor Jr, have basically the same problem — reading and assimilating what we read. We read the words, it took a while to figure out what it meant and in class this slows you down a lot,” Swaby said. “You cannot keep up with the other children so you’d be labelled dunce or stubborn and our natural response to that was hostility because people would laugh at us and we could not understand why we could not keep up with other children. So we became hostile and then you find that teachers on a whole would keep away from you.”

Luckily for the 57 year-old Swaby, at the height of his son’s problems a small group within the community was beginning exploration of a learning disorder called dyslexia. Swaby is now the group’s president and they are committed to ensuring that parents and teachers understand the challenges of dyslexia, and making sure that those with the disability are not sidelined.

Swaby has seen, first hand, the transformation in his son’s life.

“(Once he was diagnosed) he was taught differently, how to read properly and how to assimilate certain things and it has made a vast improvement in his life,” said Swaby, the pride in his voice very obvious.

“He is now building self-confidence, he is doing better in school and he is easier to get along with. He’s not as hostile anymore and I have noticed he’s taking a lot more interest in his books.”

Trevor Swaby Jr’s experience, however, raises the question of how many other Jamaicans are unaware that they have this problem.

Dr Barbara Matalon, who has studied the disability in the island over the past 25 years and is the founder of the Jamaica Association for Children with Learning Disabilities, believes that a new survey is needed to determine the number of people here with dyslexia.

“I feel that this is something that our group should be doing, lobbying for another survey,” Dr Matalon said.

“If in every other country in the world, say between 10 and 15 per cent of the children in the school population are dyslexic or specific learning disabled, why are we going to be any different? Why are we going to have any less?” asked Matalon, who is the mother of a dyslexic child.

The last survey to determine Jamaica’s dyslexic population was done about 28 years ago, and showed that roughly 17 per cent of the island’s population had some sort of learning disability.

According to Dr Matalon, who works with the Ministry of Education, learning disabilities such as dyslexia are “the largest single handicapping factor among school-aged children” around the world.

A recent study conducted by the Adult Dyslexia Organisation of Jamaica (ADOJ), the small group out of Westmoreland which Trevor Swaby heads, was far from conclusive. It is assumed that the results may be skewed because of the small sample size and other mitigating factors such as hearing and vision problems in the 57 basic school students tested at two Westmoreland schools.

The results of the survey were made public at the ADOJ’s second annual conference held in Montego Bay earlier this month.

According to ADOJ executive director, Rosemary Palmer, the government and the private sector need to do more to understand dyslexia and those who are afflicted with the disability.

“When we get the importance of our work accepted in the school system, we then have to move on to the (state-run) Heart programme, the PSOJ (Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica), the penal institutions and so forth. Ultimately, the ADOJ is supposed to be a facilitating vehicle for adult dyslexics, but of course, within that you have to talk to people in decision-making positions to raise their awareness,” she explained.

“Because otherwise, adult dyslexics are just thought of as non-players in society and what we are saying is that they are not non-players, they are prime runners. …If you don’t accommodate these people within the workplaces you don’t harness the creativity and technological intelligence which you need to get your economy moving.”

The first step, she contended, was getting the government to acknowledge that there is a problem, and then provide the support needed.

“It is not good enough for us, as a private body or even for me as a private individual, to be obliged to write letters asking them to please give us a little time. No, it should be on the curriculum of the police academy, on the curriculum of the prison wardens’ training schools, it should be of major interest to all commercial and industrial bodies,” Palmer argued.

“They should want to invite us to tell them this is what dyslexia is; this is how we can operate with dyslexic employees in order to access the contribution that they can make to our country. At the moment, we are on the sidelines and we are writing letters and sending e-mails and making phone calls and saying please take us seriously. One person with a small committee in Westmoreland can’t do that.”

The ADOJ has more than 50 registered members but only about seven people are active and make up the core group.

But Dr Matalon is sure all is not lost. She believes that while there is still a lot that the state can do, there has also been a lot of progress made over the last 25 years when most people had never heard of the word dyslexia.

She listed among the accomplishments:

* the founding of the Jamaica Association for Children with Learning Disabilities, which takes students on a part-time basis and also offers assessments;

* the opening of the Mico Diagnostic Centre where children are assessed and helped;

* Mico Teachers’ College’s offering of a special education programme that trains teachers to work with children with special needs; and

* the inclusion, since 1999, of a training component at all teachers’ colleges that advises educators how to recognise children with special needs.

“To me, that is a big thing. Teachers who have been graduating recently have been given the tools to be able to recognise that there are children with problems,” Dr Matalon said. “The next step is to be able to show the teachers what to do with children who have problems.”

And while she acceded that the government needs to do more for children with special needs, she pointed to the necessity of balancing their needs with finding the funds to relieve space constraints, provide adequate bathroom facilities and the myriad other problems now facing the educational system.

According to Dr Matalon, some children diagnosed with learning disabilities are allowed extra time to complete lessons, but she would like to see even more done.

“Eventually, I would love to get remedial teachers… in every school. And you can work on a (system) where, say all these children have problems in a certain aspect of reading, or directionality. And these children will be pulled out and go in and work with the remedial teacher for, say, half an hour, three quarters of an hour and go back into the regular class,” she said.

In the meantime, she said, there needs to be closer ties forged between the adult dyslexia group in Westmoreland and the children’s group in Kingston.

One of their major challenges is funding, which now trickles in mostly from persons who have family members affected by a learning disability. This year’s ADOJ conference was significantly scaled down from last year’s event, partly because of a lack of resources.

“Funding is one of the biggest problems because right now all of us are working out of pocket,” said Swaby. “All of us just chip in, like for the staging of the conference, everybody just chips in and we do what we have to do.”

He stressed the need for greater understanding of the disability, and the contribution people like he, his son and other dyslexics have to make to society.

“A lot of people write off dyslexics (but) most of the great inventions are by dyslexics — (some were famous artists such as) Michaelangelo, Leonardo DaVinci, (founder of Microsoft) Bill Gates, and (actress) Whoopi Goldberg. Do not write off dyslexics, we do have our uses,” he said.