Giving Compass' Take:

• Adeshina Emmanuel shares how a meandering path through Chicago Public Schools left 16-year-old Javion Grayer reading at a second-grade level.  

• How can funders help school districts work to prevent situations like Javion's? 

• Learn more about the challenges of teaching children to read. 

From kindergarten to second grade, Javion attended Woods Elementary Math & Science Academy, which was later closed for low performance and underenrollment. He missed many days of school, according to school records, and was forced to repeat second grade.

Grayer transferred Javion to Bass Elementary School a half a mile away. He passed second grade there, but was asked to repeat the third grade.

That happened at a third school, Stagg Elementary School in Auburn Gresham. The family moved there after a gunman on a bike shot and injured Javion’s two older brothers, then 15 and 16. They survived.

Javion arrived at Stagg just as it was undergoing a “turnaround,” a handoff to outside management and an often turbulent transition, designed to raise test scores at chronically underperforming schools. Stagg promoted Javion every year. At his mother’s request, the school evaluated him for the first time — in seventh grade — for special education services. That year, 87 percent of his fellow seventh graders were reading below level. Javion’s assessment found a mild intellectual disability, according to school records.

After that, Javion remembers, a dedicated aide started joining him in class once a day.

“She was the one lady who would help me a little, she would sit in the classroom and teach me how to read a bit and then she would leave,” Javion said.

But after a brief stretch of progress came calamity. Javion’s mother became ill and died suddenly the summer after he finished seventh grade. From tenuous stability, his life spun into turmoil that he could recount only much later.

Schoolwise, Javion thinks he didn’t get any one-on-one help during eighth grade. Nor did he get any at Wendell Phillips Academy High School in Bronzeville, which he entered in 2017, around the time that he moved in with Falkner. He left that school after only a few weeks because of the long commute, transferring to Excel Academy, an alternative school in Englewood.

There, according to records, he participated in most courses, without any special accommodations beyond getting extra time and guidance from his teachers. The school determined that his disabilities didn’t require direct services from a special education teacher, although his teachers were supposed to consult with those specialists quarterly. The report cautioned that Javion had missed so much school — 16 of the first 42 days of the year — that the assessment could be incomplete.

Read the full article about Chicago Public Schools by Adeshina Emmanuel at Chalkbeat.