Miss Kentucky ‘thought that I was stupid.’ She asks legislators to help kids like her.

A tearful Clark Davis, Miss Kentucky 2015, who said she has dyslexia so severe that sometimes she can’t spell her own name, testified last week in favor of General Assembly bills that would help school districts identify young students with dyslexic traits and help fund district support for those students.

“Living with dyslexia is a challenge. I was that kid who thought that I was stupid and thought that I was inadequate and to be here today and to get to move forward for other students is something that I’m very passionate about,” Davis, a senior at the University of Kentucky, told lawmakers.

Dyslexia is defined in House Bill 187 as a specific learning disability marked by “difficulties with accurate or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.”

Davis told lawmakers that despite her dyslexia, “I achieved a lot.”

She graduated from high school at 16 and received a full scholarship to UK. She said she was the youngest Miss Kentucky in history at 17 and is about to graduate at age 20 from the University of Kentucky.

But she told lawmakers on Tuesday that dyslexia still affects her life.

“I had an exam in school last week and, for all of my accomplishments and for all the gifts that the Lord has given me, I looked at that paper and I couldn’t read the first two words,” she said, crying. “And the worst thing about dyslexia is that you can’t describe it — you can’t describe it to people who don’t have it. To be 20 years old and not to be able to read.”

“I am thankful. I am thankful for all of the things and all the gifts that I have been given. Because I am not the one that ended up in jail. And I’m not the one that didn’t know what was wrong with me and was told that I was stupid over and over again. But I still feel stupid. But I know that I’m not and ...nobody that has dyslexia is stupid, ” Davis said.

“I’m thankful that there are people like you that want to help us because its harder than you can imagine,” she told lawmakers. “We push through and we can be doctors and we can be Miss Kentucky and we can be president of the United States, but it is still hard. You all have the ability to help people like me and to help the thousands and thousands of kids in our school districts that look at their papers and can not read the first two words and are too embarrassed to ask their teachers to help them.”

After her testimony, House Bill 187 and House Bill 367 were approved by the House Education committee and were sent to the full House.

After she testified, Davis posted on her Facebook page about her General Assembly appearance and explained more about what she called an uphill battle: “I do a pretty good job of maneuvering around my dyslexia.”

“I have figured out ways to process information differently than other people, but some days are harder than others. Some days my nervous system doesn’t fire as quickly as it regularly does and I can’t read at all. I don’t tell a lot of people this but some times I can’t spell my own name because I can’t process the letters it takes to get there. I have to ask my teacher to read the questions on my exams to me because I can’t always do it myself.. .... I’m going to do everything I can to help other students,” she said.

Dyslexia was Davis’ platform when she was Miss Kentucky.

House Bill 187, sponsored by Rep. Addia Wuchner, R-Florence, would require the state to provide districts with a “dyslexia toolkit” to help with instruction of students with dyslexic traits. The toolkit would be ready in January 2019, with districts required to have policies in place by June 2019 that would help identify and help students with dyslexic traits in kindergarten through third grade.

Some legislators said they were concerned that the legislation would require too much of school district officials. But Wuchner said the reporting would not be burdensome and House Bill 187 would not require screening of every student but would provide tools to help districts help students with characteristics of dyslexia.

Three school districts would be selected to serve as “laboratories of learning” by the Kentucky Commissioner of Education.

“We are going to work closely with these three districts to... find good research methodologies to really identify and be able to take to scale the lessons we learn,” state Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt told lawmakers.

Wuchner said the bill would ensure that college teacher education courses cover dyslexia as of 2020. HB 367, also sponsored by Wuchner , would provide funding for districts to support of students with dyslexic traits. It creates a dyslexia trust fund administered by the state to finance grants to local school districts. Money for the fund could come from donations, public appropriations and proceeds from a “Dyslexia Ready to Read” specialty license plate proposed by the bill.

Wuchner said dyslexia is thought to affect nearly 60,000 Kentucky students.

“That would be the size of one of our largest or second largest school districts that may be affected by dyslexia,” she told the committee.

This story was originally published February 24, 2018 at 10:55 AM with the headline "Miss Kentucky ‘thought that I was stupid.’ She asks legislators to help kids like her.."