Is the student or the system falling short?

One night at bedtime, a 10-year-old looked at her mother with tears in her eyes and said, “Mom, I think I’m stupid.”

Her friends could read. She couldn’t. The teacher kept moving on. And she’d quietly worked out that the problem must be her.

She’s not the only one. Roughly half of Manitoba students aren’t meeting grade-level reading expectations on provincial assessments. As schools begin screening young readers from kindergarten to Grade 4 this fall, it’s the right moment to ask why.

Every education system answers a basic question: who is this built for? We expect children to read by about the end of Grade 3, to sit and focus for long stretches, and to show what they know in one narrow way — written down, on time, in the format we hand them. A student who does those things is called “a good student.”

For a lot of kids, that works. This isn’t about blaming teachers. Most of the teachers I know see the kids who struggle. They stay late and go to bat for them. But a teacher can only do so much when the curriculum, the tests and the timelines are built for one kind of learner.

No definition fits everyone, and the children it doesn’t fit pay two costs.

The first is the wait. Under Bill 225, the Public Schools Amendment Act (Universal Screening for Learning Disabilities), Manitoba school divisions must now screen young students’ early reading skills and support those who need help. But screening is like a smoke detector. It tells you there might be a fire. It doesn’t put the fire out.

For children who keep struggling, the next step is usually a psychoeducational assessment, and that’s where the waiting starts. Manitoba has had one of the lowest numbers of psychologists per person in Canada. Families who come to the Learning Disabilities Association of Manitoba tell us about waits of a year or more.

The wait isn’t the same for everyone. A child whose struggle comes out as behaviour tends to be seen sooner. A child whose struggle comes out as silence waits. Our system responds faster to what disrupts us than to what devastates her.

The girl who called herself stupid was one of those quiet kids. Her family paid for a private assessment. Not every family can. Two children, same school, same struggle — one family writes a cheque and gets answers that year; the other waits until Grade 6 or 7. What decided the timeline wasn’t the need. It was the means.

The Manitoba Human Rights Commission has called for no delay in interim accommodations while a student waits for an assessment. Help shouldn’t have to wait for proof.

The second cost is harder to see. It’s shame. If being a good student means reading on schedule, a child who can’t keep up learns she isn’t one. Nobody has to say it. So, children hide, and many won’t use the supports they’re entitled to, because using them means being seen as different.

These two costs come from the same place. The definition that makes a child wait is the same one that makes her ashamed to ask.

Here’s a different definition — a good student is a student who is learning.

This isn’t about lowering the bar. We still expect every child to learn to read. That 10-year-old doesn’t need a lower bar. She needs a different path to the same place.

Here’s where we could start. Let help follow need, not paperwork. Promise every child flagged by screening timely help and track the results every year. Set a limit on how long a child waits for an assessment and fund enough psychologists to meet it.

Design classrooms so more kids fit from the start. Think of the spot where the curb dips down to the road. People who use wheelchairs fought for it. Now parents with strollers and kids on bikes use it every day, and nobody has to explain why they need it. Our classrooms should work the same way, with supports built in, so a child never has to raise her hand and ask to be the exception. A laptop or extra time should feel as ordinary as a pair of glasses. When the support is already there, there’s nothing to hide.

And that 10-year-old? Her family found her the right help. She was taught to read the way she’d needed all along — sound by sound, with nothing left to guess. Three months later, she asked to go to the library. She started writing her own stories. She was always capable. What changed was how she was taught.

Too often, when a child doesn’t fit, we still ask, “what’s wrong with her?” She learned to ask that question, too, about herself. She got the answer wrong, because we taught her the wrong question.

We built this definition. Which means we can build a different one. So let’s ask — is the student falling short of the system? Or is the system falling short of the student?

Karen Velthuys is CEO of the Learning Disabilities Association of Manitoba. This piece is adapted from her 2026 Joan Irvine Lecture at the University of Manitoba’s faculty of education.