In a functioning school system, when a child is diagnosed with dyslexia, special teachers and programs exist to help put the child back on the right path while they are still young.
But this system doesn’t work perfectly even in the best of schools (if it did, you wouldn't need us). In certain schools in America, often known as failing schools, children with dyslexia may never even receive half of a chance.
Perhaps a child is diagnosed and then put in special classes to remediate missing skills. Yet for whatever mixture of reasons, the child does not receive the help he or she needs in that special class. That means he or she is required to spend more time in special classes. And then still more time. Most likely instructional practices are never adjusted to what the child always actually needed to know.
A time comes when the child is now a high schooler, spending so much time in special classes, that he or she has no time for the necessary lab sciences, upper level English classes, or mathematics to attend college.
For some students, with lower cognitive abilities, this setting can be appropriate. However, Avery was not one of those students. Instead, he was a bright young man, highly sought after and recruited by major universities for his football skills. The problem was, he couldn't read. And did not qualify to play for NCAA, due to all the classes he had never been given the opportunity to take.