Teen Dyslexia Advocate Gives Kids What Schools Often Don’t

Miss South Dakota’s Teen Takes Dyslexia Into the Classroom

Evian Johnson was crowned Miss South Dakota’s Teen in May 2026, bringing a community initiative she calls “Use Your Power.” The platform centers on dyslexia awareness. She visits elementary schools across the state, reading books where dyslexia is at the center: “Use Your Super Power,” which shows kids they are not alone, and “Courageous Cole,” a story about a child who learns to push through a reading struggle. The message she delivers is direct: learning differently is not a limitation.

Johnson will represent South Dakota at the Miss America’s Teen Competition in September 2026. Her initiative grew from experience: she was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age. The books she reads and the conversations she opens are aimed at a specific problem: the isolation a child feels when reading is hard and no one around them explains why.

The Identity Message Is Doing Real Science

What Johnson is doing instinctively matches one of the most robust findings in educational psychology: identity-based motivation. Research by Carol Dweck and subsequent identity-based learning studies find that when children believe difficulty marks them as fundamentally broken, they disengage before they even try. A child who has written the sentence “I am bad at reading” into their own story about who they are will not bring the sustained effort that reading improvement requires. A teen standing in front of a classroom of struggling readers saying “you are not alone, and you are not broken” is interrupting that sentence. The neuroscience of motivation shows that interruption is a prerequisite, not a decoration.

The deeper science goes a step further than awareness. Brain-imaging research by Shaywitz et al. at Yale and Temple et al. at Stanford shows that children with reading difficulties, including dyslexia, develop the same neural reading pathways as typical readers after intensive, appropriate instruction. This is not metaphor. The brain physically rewires with sustained, structured practice. The International Dyslexia Association’s 2025 definition moved away from the old model of dyslexia as fixed and IQ-linked; the updated framework explicitly acknowledges that language and literacy support in the early school years is “particularly effective,” and that multi-system factors shape outcomes. The evidence now supports a higher bar than “learned to cope.”

The obstacle worth naming is a system that often tops out at accommodation: extended test time, text-to-speech, modified assignments. It rarely asks whether the underlying reading skill is being actively built alongside those supports. Accommodations are a legitimate scaffold. Special education’s own research describes how the right support, at the right moment, lifts a struggling learner more than it lifts anyone else. But the same research documents the failure mode: when a support is handed out because it is easier than addressing the actual gap, the incentive to build the underlying skill quietly disappears. The question parents deserve to be asking is whether the support their child receives is building the reading pathways, or substituting for the expectation that they get built.

What to Do With This at Home and at School

Start with what Johnson is modeling. Before intensive reading instruction, before structured literacy sessions, a child needs to believe the effort has a destination. “Your brain is building stronger reading pathways” is not a platitude; it describes what fMRI studies now show happening in real time. Build that belief before anything else, because a child who has given up will not engage with the practice that drives the change.

From there, pair the identity work with instruction that actually builds the skill. Questions worth bringing to school: What specific reading instruction is my child receiving that targets phonological processing and decoding? What evidence-based program is in use, and how are we measuring actual reading fluency and accuracy growth, not accommodation use? If the school’s answer is primarily a list of accommodations rather than a description of explicit, systematic reading instruction, that is useful information about where to push next.

If you suspect dyslexia, a professional evaluation remains the route to formal accommodations including an IEP or 504 plan, and to ruling out vision, hearing, or other contributing factors. A screener tells you where to start today; it is a starting point, not a diagnosis, and it does not replace an evaluation if your child needs those supports.