The chimichanga solution | 4

Kelly, a kindergarten teacher, knew her son McKay struggled with reading even before he started school. It took years and repeated pushback from the school before he was tested and diagnosed with dyslexia. Even then, the district resisted formally including it in his education plan. By seventh grade, McKay was faking being sick just to avoid school. 

This episode follows the family through years of reading interventions that weren’t working, and their decision to enroll McKay at the Gow School, a boarding school for students with dyslexia — and to sue their district to cover the cost. It asks what school choice really means when getting the right education requires resources most families don’t have. 

Along the way: what “wait to fail” means, how structured phonics instruction works, and the legal standard (a Carter case) that determines whether families can be reimbursed for tuition when a public school falls short.

• Read: The Education Freedom Tax Credit: What families of kids with disabilities need to know

• Listen: What if I think my child might have dyslexia? 

• Read: How is special education funded?

• Explore: IEP Guide for Parents

• Read: The Brief: Understood News

Anya Kamenetz: When McKay was in seventh grade, he really didn't like school. This is his mom, Kelly.

Kelly: There were days that he would tell me he wasn't going to get on the bus, and I remember driving him to the bus stop and waiting there until I watched him get on the bus.

Anya: One day McKay got a little more creative.

Kelly: He manufactured his own fake vomit so that he wouldn't have to go to school.

Anya: What?

Kelly: Yes. He had taken Sunny Delight and mixed up other leftovers to make something authentic. He was going to put it in the toilet and tell me he got sick and — hopefully — I don't know how long this was going to go on.

Anya: This Sunny Delight scheme didn't come out of nowhere. School had been a tough place for McKay since kindergarten. Kelly is a kindergarten teacher herself in a neighboring school district to McKay's, pretty much in the dead center of Pennsylvania where they live. She's taught a lot of kids to read over the years, including McKay's older sister.

Kelly: I used "Hooked on Phonics" with her, she was reading by the time she went to kindergarten, you know, she knew her alphabet and — McKay — we were getting ready to go to kindergarten, he still did not put the letters in his name in the correct order or always know all of them. So my gut was telling me like there's a different problem.

Anya: But it took time and pushing for the public school to acknowledge the problem. This is getting to be a theme in this podcast. The school district didn't respond to my requests for comment.

Kelly: By first grade I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa," you know, this isn't a kid that's not getting support, that's not getting worked with at home. He's getting all these things. Why are we still stuck in this space? Maybe this is a McKay problem that we need to look at. We had a meeting and they kind of were like, "No, no, no, we should wait longer." I was like, "No, we're done. I want you to test him. I want to see does he have a disability or not."

(06:45) The school district initially resists a dyslexia diagnosis, leading McKay to fall significantly behind his peers.

Anya: The school did agree to test McKay, but they didn't agree with Kelly on what the results meant. They agreed to record a determination of ADHD, which would allow him to have accommodations like extra time on tests. But they resisted giving McKay an individualized education program, or IEP, that would entitle him to special education services for dyslexia.

Kelly: I said this isn't just ADHD. We can have that on there, but it also has to be the reading disability because the numbers show that. And I was told eventually that they would do it, but if I were just be patient, he wouldn't need this IEP after all and by the end of second grade he'd outgrow this.

Anya: They were discouraging you.

Kelly: They were discouraging me and they said I just need to be patient and he would outgrow this. He has yet to outgrow this.

Anya: I'm Anya Kamenetz, I'm an education reporter, and you're listening to "Zero Reject: The Uncertain Future of Special Education." This is a podcast about why some families seem to struggle so much to get their children the free appropriate public education that is guaranteed by law. What's happening right now as the Trump administration is seemingly weakening that guarantee, and what might work better for every student. This is episode four: "The Chimichanga Solution."

Anya: McKay's public school refused to include dyslexia in his individualized education program in the first grade. Reluctantly, Kelly and her husband went along with that decision. School districts being slow to identify learning disabilities is something that is not supposed to happen, but it does. It happens so often that it has a name. It's called "wait to fail," and is incredibly exasperating for parents. Kelly tutored him as much as she could. McKay just fell further behind.

Kelly: As his peers are able to read more and he is still stuck at, you know, "cat" and "bat" and "dog," the gap is wider.

Anya: The gap is much wider. We're going to be talking a lot about dyslexia in this episode, so here's some background on exactly what it is. And we should note the definition is always evolving. Dyslexia is by far the most common specific learning disability. It's often reported that at least seven out of 10 students in special education overall have dyslexia as at least one diagnosis.

Anya: Dyslexia is officially a neurocognitive — a brain condition — defined by persistent difficulty reading words and spelling compared to peers. Dyslexia, like other disabilities, ranges on a spectrum. But you can't test for dyslexia the way you can test for, say, a virus. So it can be harder to diagnose when kids are younger and first learning to read. Nevertheless, states have a legal responsibility called "child find" to identify students as early as possible for special education because, in most cases, the earlier you intervene, the better.

(13:20) After years of little progress in public school, Kelly discovers McKay has not actually improved his reading skills.

Anya: Kelly and her husband eventually paid $3,400 to have McKay privately tested. The neuropsych agreed that he had dyslexia, and when it came to the spectrum of dyslexia, he was far out on one end of needing a lot of help to learn to read. By this time it was the spring of 2020 — COVID time. McKay was in second grade. Kelly was shoeing her two kids outside to play in their quiet suburban neighborhood so she could teach her kindergarten classes online.

Anya: Over that summer she worked with McKay on his reading. In third grade his school came back on a hybrid schedule. They scaled up how much reading help they were offering him. But year after year through fourth, fifth, and even sixth grade, McKay wasn't making much, if any, progress.

Kelly: It was very hard every year to see my kindergartners in my class surpass him. That was really hard. That I'm having these five and six year olds outread my kid, outspell my kid, outwrite my kid, and every year it kept happening, you know, and he wasn't catching up.

Anya: What was so hard about that?

Kelly: It's like, am I failing as a parent? Am I not doing enough? So just really — I know that this is him and, you know, he just needs more and it's not going to happen overnight, but it has to happen faster than it's happening.

Anya: McKay was a happy kid in lots of ways. He behaved well in school. He joined the boy scouts. He loved going hunting with his father and grandfather. The family visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida one year on vacation and McKay got really into NASA. But his mom and dad were secretly staying up at night worried about his future.

Kelly: He wants to go to college, he wants to get jobs — like, we worried like, "Are you going to be able to read a street sign to drive? You going to know your car manual? You going to be able to read your kid a bedtime story at night?" It's scary.

Anya: He had friends, but sometimes it was hard to be different.

Kelly: Like our neighbor's grandson — and kids aren't saying it to be mean, you know — I just remember the one time they were playing "Minecraft" together. And I remember the one kid saying, "Wait, you mean you can't read that?" So to kids sometimes it was just shocking, like we're all the same age and you can't read the directions on your "Minecraft"?

Anya: Kelly, meanwhile, was becoming a self-taught dyslexia expert.

Kelly: Even though I'm a teacher I never really — I mean I got kids IEPs, I looked at them, I read them, I understood them, but I didn't always look at the testing data and all that information.

Anya: You started to educate yourself more and more on special ed. Why are you laughing?

Kelly: Because I've done a lot of research.

Anya: And so every time you went into an IEP meeting you must have known more and more.

Kelly: Yes, like the one time I was quoting Hasbrouck and Tindal, who are like the experts on fluency norms, and I quoted their fluency norms and I was asked, "Where are you getting these numbers from?" And when I told them where they were like, "Who?" and I'm like, "Come on, guys!"

Anya: Like you're supposed to be specialists in this.

Kelly: Yes.

(19:50) McKay finally finds success and confidence in his reading ability at the specialized Gow School.

Anya: Of course I didn't know what this was and I had to look it up. Jan Hasbrouck and Gerald Tindal are two researchers who have put together and analyzed thousands of reading scores on different tests to figure out, on average, how many words per minute a kid at different ages can normally read. In other words, norms for fluency.

Anya: And Kelly acknowledges that while she was getting impatient with the educators at McKay's school, she herself was a public school teacher who had students with IEPs in her classrooms and she still didn't know all this stuff until she had her own kid with dyslexia. There is a lot to know about all different types of learning disabilities and the best way to help students. And teachers almost always will tell you that they are not getting enough training or support to deal with every student who comes their way.

Anya: Eventually Kelly also hired an advocate and an attorney just to cover her bases.

Kelly: I need guidance at this point. I know my rights, but I also know that I need help because these are legal matters.

Anya: Everything came to a head in the fall of 2024 — seventh grade for McKay. Kelly had asked the school district back in fourth grade to switch to tutoring McKay using something called the Wilson Reading System. This is a program based on what's called the Orton-Gillingham approach. Orton-Gillingham focuses on teaching students the relationships between letters and sounds in the most direct, explicit way possible with lots and lots of structure and repetition.

Anya: The school pulled McKay out of class in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades to work with a one-on-one tutor on the Wilson program. It was hard because he often had to miss his favorite classes: band, gym, even recess. Kelly had her doubts about how effective it was based on her work with McKay at home, but the school was reassuring.

Kelly: We have always questioned like, "Is he really making the progress you're saying?" We were using fifth grade benchmarks for him and we just weren't seeing the progress. And they'd say, "No, no, he'll get it. This kind of told us it would be okay."

Anya: Seventh grade is the first year of middle school in McKay's part of Pennsylvania. That year the district wanted to stop offering Wilson to McKay. But their attorney stepped in and the district ultimately agreed to provide a new Wilson tutor over Zoom.

Kelly: McKay was saying, "Mom, she is making me redo all this stuff." So he was kind of frustrated. But I can see why she's making him do all this stuff. He's still not spelling words that have a silent "e" at the end correctly.

Anya: Several weeks into the new school year...

Kelly: I got an email about, "Hey, you said you wanted to meet. Would you like to have that meeting?" And I remember saying to my husband, "There's something wrong. They don't invite me to a meeting."

Anya: You're always the one pushing for it.

Kelly: Yes, they're not looking to talk to me. So that was telling me that there was a problem.

Anya: Her gut was right. The meeting was very bad news.

Kelly: It's the director of special ed, the supervisor of secondary special ed, the Wilson teacher, the special ed teacher, the actual English teacher for seventh grade, and then our attorney and my husband and I.

Anya: And what does the Wilson teacher say?

Kelly: Well she pulled out her big Wilson assessment and she showed us, you know, that she tested him and said that he was a non-responder and that she was moving him back to level three of Wilson. And that was just devastating. We thought he was on seven moving to eight and there's 12 levels of it. So we thought he was almost done. We thought he was finishing.

Anya: Basically it was like McKay had made no progress at all in reading in three or maybe even four years. Here's McKay's take on this.

McKay: They said that they were teaching me better but they really weren't. And then I got a new teacher for Wilson and then they sent me like all the way back, which really made me mad and made my mom mad.

Anya: Did you know that you weren't making progress?

McKay: No.

Anya: You felt like you were or you didn't really know?

McKay: I thought I was.

Anya: How did that feel to find that out?

McKay: It really made me mad. Like, it made me even more stressed out.

Anya: For Kelly, she says the feeling was...

Kelly: Like grief, you know, like, "What is happening? This has all just been for naught. It didn't work." It was hard. It was a real blow.

Anya: Kelly's attorney didn't let the moment go to waste. Right then and there in the meeting he brought up something that Kelly and her husband had been considering: sending McKay to a private boarding school for kids with dyslexia in upstate New York called the Gow School. That would mean suing the school district to get reimbursed for the tuition. So they did, and they are.

(26:45) McKay demonstrates his improved reading skills, reflecting on his newfound confidence and the emotional challenges of being away from home.

Anya: On the last day before spring break I drove six hours from Brooklyn to just outside Buffalo to visit McKay in eighth grade at the Gow School. It's a 99 year old boarding school for fifth through 12th grades on a sprawling green campus, with all the students in preppy uniforms and ties. It was designed from the beginning for kids just like McKay. This is Luke Salerno, who's the associate head of school for teaching and learning and has been at Gow for more than 25 years.

Luke Salerno: Our founder, Peter Gow, he taught Latin, a number of language courses at Nichols. And Nichols was the school in Buffalo at the turn of the century. And so he had these really smart young men at this powerful elite school and they were struggling with reading. And so he became really good at Nichols working with these boys during their study halls. And so he realized that he didn't want to stay at a school just teaching study hall. He bought some property out here in the country on the other side of the creek and he built a little teepee and there was a couple little shacks and he started a summer camp for those boys that he worked with during the school year to work on reading where they weren't going to be by their friends being embarrassed that they needed to work with Mr. Gow on reading. He did this for about two years, 1924, 1925, and then he decided he was going to leave Nichols and start a school and do this full time.

Anya: Gow is now co-ed and Salerno tells me 100% of the students at Gow go on to college. Not specialized schools for kids with learning disabilities, but mainstream colleges that have good supports, from big public campuses to small private liberal arts colleges. That's a pretty big deal for these students who come in at fifth or sixth or seventh grades, always after many years of being unsuccessful at school.

Luke: The whole point for the school was prepare boys for college. So there's just an expectation of you go to Gow, you're getting ready for college.

Anya: But how do they do it? How do they teach these kids to read? Remember when I mentioned the Orton-Gillingham method? Gow started out by collaborating with Dr. Samuel Orton, who was based in New York City.

Luke: Dr. Orton would refer his students to us and they'd come from New York City on a train and stay at the Gow School for eight months of the year. And Mr. Gow took the ideas and formed his own reading program, what is now RL, Reconstructive Language. His idea was we're rebuilding the student's reading skills, we're reconstructing it. And then Dr. Orton, of course, he went off, met Anna Gillingham, and they formed what is known as Orton-Gillingham method, which is very similar to the Gow RL method. And what's really neat is in the last couple decades, you know, Mr. Gow ended up being, I would argue, the victor of the reading wars.

Anya: The reading wars is a big ongoing debate over how to best teach kids to read, which is an issue that we'll talk about more in the next episode. What you need to know here is the best evidence we have currently supports using structured phonics lessons, emphasizing teaching letters and the sounds they make to all children in their early years of school. So the same kind of direct explicit instruction that helps kids with dyslexia learn to read also helps all students. We haven't needed to change; we stayed consistent the entire time.

Anya: Reconstructive Language is a fancy name, but the core of the RL method is simple — incredibly, incredibly simple. Are you ready? It's flashcards. Every student at Gow carries around a set of index cards. They have a hole punched in the corner and they're on a big stainless steel ring that snaps open like the one on a three ring binder. I visited McKay in his dorm room as he's packing up for break and I ask if he'll show me his cards.

McKay: These are the RL cards. They're like phonics cards and they're to help you like learn your sounds and stuff. We usually make new sets like once a week.

Anya: How long does it take to write them out?

McKay: Like to do a full set? Like five minutes.

Anya: Will you tell me some of them?

McKay: I'll do my newer one. This is like a sound and a word. I-G-H-T: fight, -ite. O-V-E: drove, glove, prove, of, uv, oo-v. I-V-E: live, alive, iv, ive. A-U-G-H-T: he caught his naughty daughter and taught her not to slaughter, -aught.

Anya: Wow! Say that one more time.

McKay: A-U-G-H-T: he caught his naughty daughter and taught her not to slaughter, -aught.

Anya: Wow! That's a funny sentence.

McKay: Yeah, I know.

Anya: What does it mean?

McKay: I don't even know what it means. But it works.

(33:10) Kelly discusses the heavy financial and emotional toll of her ongoing legal battle with the school district to secure McKay's education.

Anya: I talked to another longtime teacher at Gow, Jen Cannon, the Dean of Faculty, and she told me she thinks that the RL method is the special sauce. But it is just that — a condiment. The meat of what makes Gow different is a whole bunch of things: like the small classes (just five or six students), lots and lots of individual attention, having a teaching staff that is trained and experienced (often for decades) to work with kids like McKay, reinforcing the phonics lessons in every subject, coaching the kids in executive functioning and on advocating for help when they need it. And socially it really helps having a school full of students who are all in the same boat.

Anya: Is it easy to make friends here?

McKay: Oh yeah, really easy.

Anya: How does it feel knowing that everybody here is working on reading like you?

McKay: It makes me feel more comfortable, like, being around — like, reading around people now. At my old school I felt like uncomfortable reading around other people and I thought they were judging me all the time. Now I feel like I've learned like not to hide it — not to hide my dyslexia. It's made me more confident about myself.

Anya: Not just about reading?

McKay: Yeah, not just about reading.

Anya: Are you reading more for fun than you used to?

McKay: Yeah, way more. I just like reading now.

Anya: Do you remember the first book that you were like, "Actually, I'm having fun"?

McKay: These ones right here.

Anya: He walks over to his desk next to his bed and there's a pile of this fantasy adventure graphic novel series called "Lightfall." This is a 13 year old kid, and a year and a half ago he was reading at a first grade level, at the first or second percentile. I was worried about putting McKay on the spot, but I was so curious to see what he'd do. Is there — would you — would you read to me?

McKay: Oh yeah. It could just be a little bit. "Morning, morning Nim. Please stop knocking this over. It's — it'll break one day. Morning, good morning Beatrice. What — would you sleep — or how'd you sleep? A little restless. Restless, eh? Hmm. No matter. Scrambled eggs are the perfect cure for that."

Anya: Thank you, that was great. So what I just asked you to do, that was a little stressful?

McKay: Not really.

Anya: It would have been.

McKay: Yeah, it would have been.

Anya: But now you can just do it. And if you make a mistake it's okay. And you can fix it. I heard you go back and fixing a couple words.

McKay: Yeah, I usually do that a lot.

Anya: Do you think about going back to your home school?

McKay: Sometimes I miss it, but like, the only reason why I miss it is because my friends — like, my old friends there.

Anya: Yeah, totally. So you'd want to stay here all the way through high school?

McKay: Yeah, definitely.

Anya: Don't you miss your parents?

McKay: You don't want me to answer that.

Anya: Sending a kid away to school a four-hour drive away at age 13 was never in Kelly's family's plans. And I should point out that it violates the principle of integration in IDEA — that kids with learning disabilities should be able to be served in the community. Kelly cried when she first told me about Gow. Her mom, McKay's grandma, took it especially hard.

Kelly: She was sad, you know, like, he's small, he looks younger than what he is. He went to Boy Scouts camp the summer before and I had to pick him up because he was homesick. She was just like, "Kelly, do you really want to do this?" No, not really, but is this what he needs? In some cases it's just the way it has to be.

Anya: Kelly believes Gow is the right place for McKay. But they don't have any realistic way to pay for it themselves. Gow costs $90,500 a year for boarding students. Kelly's husband works in maintenance at a local college. So far they've paid for the tuition, the private neuropsych who tested McKay, and the lawyer out of their savings, including the employee death benefit from Kelly's first husband, who died when she was in her mid-20s. But they can't keep that up.

Kelly: No, like we buy our cars and we pay for them in six years. You know, we can't buy a luxury car every year and pay it off every year. And that's what his tuition is like.

Anya: And since we're talking about money, I want to point out something here about the difference between private and public provision of special education and what choice really means if we're talking about redesigning the system. When someone like Jonathan Butcher from the Heritage Foundation talks about making the system less adversarial and giving parents the freedom to choose private schools to meet their students' needs, he means taking taxpayer money out of state education budgets and allowing families to use it freely, with minimal oversight, to enroll in private schools.

Anya: This is usually called a school voucher, although it goes by other names. There is a federal tax credit program which was passed as part of the "Big Beautiful Bill" Act that takes effect next year. So far dozens of states have opted in. Pennsylvania is one of these programs too, although it's not universal. It provides scholarships of up to $15,000 per year for kids in special education who live in low-performing school districts and whose families make below a certain income.

Anya: That kind of money might cover tuition for, say, a small private Catholic or evangelical Christian school. In fact, studies show that is where they are most often used. Lower-cost private schools like these, kind of by definition, do not have the trained teachers for kids with complicated individualized education programs. And remember, private schools are not obligated by law to accommodate special education students at all — they can simply turn them away.

Anya: Then there are the private schools like Gow designed from the ground up for students with disabilities. Some do an amazing job. But they tend to be as expensive as it gets for a private school: $80,000, $90,000, even $200,000 for day school, not just boarding schools. While it sounds good to say we could just give families choices and not have to fight about it, I'm not sure exactly how that adds up in practice.

Anya: So Kelly and her husband are going the long, hard, and litigious route. They are suing the school district to force them to pay McKay's Gow School tuition under something called a "Carter Case." A 1993 Supreme Court decision, "Florence County School District Four v. Carter," held that courts may order tuition reimbursement for special education students for a private school of the parents' choice if two things are proven.

Anya: One, the district failed to offer a free appropriate public education or FAPE. And two, the private school the parent wants to send them to is an appropriate setting for this child. "Appropriate" doesn't necessarily mean optimal; students aren't all entitled to a Lexus. Courts may differ on what they decide a particular individual student needs, which is part of why all this is so complicated. I asked Kelly what it would take for her to send McKay back to public school.

Kelly: I'd have to see a plan where he would have his needs met, where he would have small group instruction, where he would be able to take part in, you know, other classes and not just spend all of his time remediating.

Anya: Sometimes school districts settle. But McKay's is fighting. I reached out to the district and they haven't responded to my requests for comment. McKay switched to the Gow School in the spring of seventh grade and they had their first hearing with the district in May of that year, 2025.

Kelly: So the district's argument is that due to the nature of his disability, this is as much progress as he can make. They actually told us that we just need to be happy that he's reading at all.

Anya: How'd that feel?

Kelly: That was infuriating. Like you've actually given up on my child. You're actually stating that you don't think he can do anything more.

Anya: And for you as a teacher, where does that attitude get you?

Kelly: Well if you think that that's all a child can get, that's all they will get. You know, that has been proven. If you think that that's all they can do, that's all they can do. If you don't think they're going to get any farther, they're not.

Anya: Kelly isn't just fighting for particular supports and services. Like all the parents I've talked to for this podcast, she is fighting fundamentally for the world to believe in her children's ability to make progress. In taking on the school district, Kelly has some advantages compared to other parents I've met. She's not intimidated by the educators on the other side of the IEP table — she's literally a teacher herself. She and her husband have the money to hire a lawyer and pay up front, so she didn't have to rely on the Office for Civil Rights — she could go through the alternative, which is the courts.

Anya: And she could go ahead and switch her kid into a private option without waiting for the public school to make the changes. Still really stressful and also a financial risk. And there's a difference between Pennsylvania and Indiana, which we talked about in episode two. Indiana is number 38 in per-pupil spending for public school. Pennsylvania is number 13. They don't have the same budget constraints to point to as to why they're not able to give McKay the level of intense instruction he seems to need to make progress.

Anya: Not only that, Pennsylvania is considered a national leader in special education rights, going all the way back to the foundational 1972 case, "PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," that helped pave the way for IDEA.

Kelly: Not all schools fight families this hard and I don't know why they're fighting us so hard. Like I said, they are spending a lot of money to — I don't know if it's because they don't want to set a precedent — but not all kids need this either.

Anya: School funding, of course, is really complicated and money for special ed comes from different places than money for other things. But what really gets under Kelly's skin is that at the same time the district is fighting her on McKay's tuition, they are building a $24 million high school football stadium. She calls it the Cadillac of football fields.

Kelly: They totally knocked everything down, rebuilding it, and they've got like big glass windows. It's going to have a whole dining area for events — like an event space.

Anya: This is high school football?

Kelly: Yes.

Anya: And what do you think when you drive by it?

Kelly: I just get furious. I think it was just very extravagant and, you know, if you have money for that then you can meet needs of kids. We can have both. It stinks. It makes me furious. There's some days that it's really hard, you know. And you just keep saying it'll get better one day. I know that there's an end and I know that there's a reason I'm doing this and I'm just trusting that we'll get an outcome that we need.

Anya: But even as the future is uncertain, the change in McKay's life has already been major. According to the test scores Kelly showed me, he's advanced at least a grade level in all areas of reading from last spring to this spring. That's after three years of not making any progress at all. And there's other signs too.

Kelly: When he came home at Thanksgiving this year, we were at a restaurant and he always gets the same thing at that restaurant, he never ever looks at the menu. And this time he looked through the menu at the Mexican restaurant and found chimichangas and ordered them.

Anya: And that's such a simple thing.

Kelly: Yes.

Anya: But it's a thing that's like, you're navigating the world.

Kelly: Yes. You're looking at the menu, you're deciding what you want.

Anya: We're four episodes into this podcast now, and I feel like I've brought you a whole bunch of stories about how it's so hard for so many families in special education and how it got this way. We've also heard from teachers and school districts about the lack of resources and preparation that makes their job so much harder than it should be. And I've talked about some of the policy changes that have come along and made an already kind of broken and unequal system even more uncertain. I want to start telling you about some people who are thinking creatively about how to make it better.

McKay: Most of my memories are literally me building like forts in the woods with my teachers.

Anya: That's next time on "Zero Reject."

Anya: "Zero Reject: The Uncertain Future of Special Education" is written and reported by me, Anya Kamenetz, and edited by Neil Drumming. Sound design by Cody Nelson. Briana Berry is our production director. Anna Rothschild is our senior producer. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. Additional production help from Erica Audi, Ezgi Kaya is our legal counsel. Our music was composed by Marcus Bagala. Justin D. Wright mixed the show. 

This series was brought to you by Understood.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people navigate the realities of neurodiversity. From Understood.org our executive directors are Laura Key and Scott Cocchiere. Additional editorial support from Jordan Davidson, Andy Kahn, and Janet Decker. Special thanks to all the families who shared their stories with us. If you want to help Understood continue this work, consider making a donation at understood.org/give.