When a teen with dyslexia faked his identity to play college football

Schoolchildren with dyslexia who usually find themselves in ill-equipped schools usually never get the slightest chance to shine.

But one boy decided to beat the system. Jarryn Avery. This bright, young man was always sidestepped because he could not read, and he was never given the opportunity to pursue his dreams to be a pro-footballer.

So what he did was team up with bestie John Knott to devise a plan: he would become Knott. The switch worked and he eventually was recruited to Kansas State University.

As expected, it turned out that hiding one’s identity and trying to be another person was more painful than the Maryland teen had thought, and he did not keep it up for very long.

Broken system in need of fixing

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.

There’s always hope

However, there was one extremely important event that occurred during his time at Kansan State University: a senior student named Jeana Bolton discovered his inability to read and taught him how.

Because of Bolton’s help, Avery was able to go on to become a successful college student.

And that’s what we are here for. We, just like Jeana Bolton, would like to see all the Jarryn Averys move on to greatness and not hindered by the system.

We believe that the key to success is building up the fundamental learning skills – the building blocks of learning.