October is Learning Disabilities/Dyslexia/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Awareness Month. In 2015, the U.S. Secretary of Education spoke to the importance of recognizing the 2.5 million students in the U.S. who have a specific learning disability and expressly included dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, as well as the 6 million with ADHD.
This year, in 2020, the Presidential message was specific to dyslexia. While we are supportive of dyslexia awareness and many in our community have dyslexia, this feels disappointingly narrow to the broader learning disability community. While the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services does have a blog post from the nonprofit National Center of Learning Disabilities mentioning ADHD, dyslexia, and visual-motor impairments, we have still have seen no mention of awareness about disabilities in written expression or dysgraphia.
So we are taking the matter into our own hands and reaching out to all of you in our community. Help us make Learning Disability Awareness Month into a true Dysgraphia Awareness Month!
Educate those you know about differences in written expression and that learning disabilities go beyond dyslexia. To help, we have created some shareable social media posts for you on our new infographics page. You can even just share this article to get this image below:
You can also use hashtags: #dysgraphia #LDAwarenessMonth #LDVoices and tag us! (@dysgraphialife)
Help the community be heard and help us raise awareness that there are many types of learning differences and we need to accommodate for and be respectful of all of them.