Meet Aleysha Ortiz, a 19-year-old who graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in Connecticut. It would seem congratulations are in order … except she says she's functionally illiterate.
After twelve years in the Hartford public school system, graduating with honors, and receiving a scholarship to the University of Connecticut, she is now suing her school district because she apparently cannot reed or rite (couldn't help it).
She graduated with honors, which usually means a student has demonstrated academic excellence. But after 12 years of attending public schools in Hartford, Aleysha testified at a May 2024 city council meeting that she could not read or write. Suddenly, she says, school officials seemed concerned about awarding her a diploma.
Two days before graduation, she says, school district officials told her she could defer accepting the diploma in exchange for intensive services. Aleysha didn't listen.
'I decided, they (the school) had 12 years,' she says. 'Now it's my time.'
Aleysha is now suing the Hartford Board of Education and the City of Hartford for negligence, as well as her special education case manager, Tilda Santiago, for negligent infliction of emotional distress.
Ortiz, who grew up in Hartford and is originally from Puerto Rico, testified in a city council meeting that the school system utterly failed her. In her lawsuit, she claims that she had problems with "letter, sound and number recognition" as early as first grade, but these issues weren't addressed by the school.
Ortiz isn't the only one claiming to have this problem in the modern American educational system. We covered her case briefly along with the growing problem last year:
According to Ortiz, by the time she was in sixth grade, she was reading at a kindergarten level, and even in high school, she was still struggling. Ortiz then says that instead of fixing the problem, the school district pushed her through the system.
Somehow, despite her self-professed inability to read or write, Ortiz graduated with honors, and is now attending the University of Connecticut, where she is completing college assignments with apps that translate text to speech and speech to text.
The apps gave Ortiz "a voice that I never thought I had," she said.
Quite the advert for UConn, isnt it?
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