CNN
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Aleysha Ortiz is 19 years old and dreams of one day writing stories and maybe even a book. That may sound like a reasonable aspiration for a teenager recently out of high school, but for Aleysha it will be much harder.
Despite graduating last June from Hartford Public High School in Hartford, Connecticut, and earning a scholarship to college, Aleysha is illiterate. She says she cannot read or write.
Many high school seniors feel proud and excited in the days before graduation. But Aleysha tells CNN she felt scared.
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.
The board’s chairperson, Jennifer Hockenhull, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
So did Jonathan Harding, chief legal officer for the City of Hartford, who told CNN, “I generally do not publicly remark on ongoing litigation.” CNN reached out to Santiago through her attorney but did not receive a response.
In a statement to CNN, Hartford Public Schools said, “While Hartford Public Schools cannot comment on pending litigation, we remain deeply committed to meeting the full range of needs our students bring with them when they enter our schools — and helping them reach their full potential.”
But one educator says Aleysha’s story doesn’t surprise him.
Jesse Turner, who runs the Literacy Center at Central Connecticut State University, says the quality of special education in public schools often varies according to zip code and demographics.
A 2019 report from EdBuild, which promotes equity in public schools, found majority non-White school districts in the US get $23 billion less than districts that mostly serve White students. Minority enrollment in Hartford’s public schools was at about 90% during the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years.
“America should be asking a question: Do we really care about our children — all of our children?” Turner asks.
Aleysha was born in Puerto Rico, where even as a toddler she says she showed evidence of learning deficits.
Her mother, Carmen Cruz, says she knew early on that her daughter needed help.
“I saw that she had a specific problem she had to deal with,” Cruz told CNN.
When Aleysha was 5 years old Cruz moved her family to Connecticut, believing Aleysha would receive better services for her learning difficulties.
But her struggles in school continued.
In first grade Aleysha “had difficulty with letter, sound and number recognition,” according to her lawsuit. And because her learning disabilities were not addressed, Aleysha began acting out in class.
“I was the bad child,” Aleysha says.
By the time Aleysha reached the 6th grade, she says in the lawsuit, evaluations showed she was reading at a kindergarten or first-grade level.
High school was no better. In her sophomore year at Hartford Public High School, Tilda Santiago became Aleysha’s special education teacher and case manager. The lawsuit alleges Santiago subjected Aleysha “to repeated bullying and harassment,” including stalking her on school grounds. The suit also alleges Santiago belittled Aleysha in front of teachers and other students and mocked her learning disabilities.
Aleysha says she reported the behavior to school officials and Santiago was eventually removed as her case manager “because of the dysfunctional relationship” between them, according to the lawsuit.
Aleysha also says her mother advocated on her behalf and urged the principal and other school officials to do a better job of addressing her daughter’s disabilities. A mother of four, Cruz doesn’t speak English and says she didn’t go to school beyond the eighth grade.
“I didn’t know English very well, I didn’t know the rules of the schools. There were a lot of things that they would tell me, and I let myself go by what the teachers would tell me because I didn’t understand anything.”
By the 11th grade, when Aleysha reported she still “could barely hold a pencil,” she began speaking up for herself. She says she knew if she were ever going to fulfill her dreams of becoming a writer or leading a normal life, she needed to know how to read and write.
In her senior year some teachers suggested Aleysha get tested for dyslexia, a learning disability that makes reading difficult because of an inability to recognize sounds and how they relate to letters and words.
Also, during her senior year, Aleysha made a surprising announcement: She’d been accepted at the University of Connecticut and planned to attend in the fall.
Just one month before graduation, Aleysha says she finally began receiving the additional testing she had been asking for. The evaluations were not completed until the last day of high school, the lawsuit states. The testing revealed Aleysha still “required explicitly taught phonics, fluency and reading comprehension.”
Phonics is typically first taught in kindergarten.
After being tested, Aleysha was also diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (“ADHD”), oppositional defiant disorder (“ODD”), unspecified anxiety disorder, unspecified communication disorder and dyslexia.
Last fall Aleysha enrolled at the University of Connecticut as a full-time student, taking two classes. She wants to study public policy.
So, how did Aleysha become a college student who can’t read or write? The same way she got through high school, she says: By relying on apps that translate text to speech and speech to text.
She used the technology to fill out her college application, including writing an essay. She also got help from other people on navigating the process and received several financial grants and scholarships to pay for UConn.
The apps gave “me a voice that I never thought I had,” she says.
Aleysha says her teachers mostly just passed her from one grade to the next in elementary and middle school. But by the time she reached high school she’d figured out how to use the technology to fulfill her assignments.
When most teenagers were hanging out at the mall, going to school events or going on dates, Aleysha says she was spending 4 to 5 hours a night doing homework.
Aleysha says she’d record all of her classes on her cell phone, then later replay everything her teachers said. She used her laptop’s voice-to-text tool to search the definition of each word, then turned that text into audio she could understand. Once she grasped the assignment, she’d speak the answer, turn it into text and then cut and paste the words into her homework.
Because of her limited vocabulary and speech impediment, the translation was not always accurate or grammatically correct, she says. But using the technology helped raise her grades from Cs and Ds to As and Bs, she adds.
She said she would start her homework as soon as she got home from school and finish each night at 1 or 2 a.m. before getting up at 6 a.m. to take the bus back to school.
Aleysha demonstrated for CNN how she uses the app. She chose a passage from a book, took an image of it on her phone and then played the phone audio reading the passage aloud to her.
When asked if she could read the passage from the book, Aleysha told CNN, “It’s impossible. I just see these words everywhere… with no meaning.”
Aleysha says college has been very difficult. UConn is providing academic support, but she hasn’t attended classes since February 1. She says she took some time off to get mental health treatment but plans to return soon.
Aleysha’s lawsuit comes as President Donald Trump is taking steps to get rid of the federal Department of Education, saying he wants “to stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth.”
The proposed move would gut the agency staff and leave the funding and education of students to states and local municipalities.
Turner, the Connecticut educator, says shutting down the DOE is a bad idea. He argues that if you put the responsibility of funding children’s education in the hands of each state, not all states will do the right thing.
“How do I protect the special education children? Who do I go to?” he says. Turner adds that the DOE is where schools, students and parents go to lodge a complaint, because “they have to investigate.”
Aleysha says she is taking legal action because school leaders “don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care,” adding that she wants them to be held accountable for what she says she experienced. She is also seeking compensatory damages.
Cruz, Aleysha’s mother, tells CNN she is speaking out now about her daughter “so other people in my position don’t have to go through the same thing.”
As she looks back on her 12 years in the Hartford public school system, Aleysha says she feels sad that she wasn’t taught to read and write. She also says she will continue to speak out, because she believes her city schools can do better.
“I’m a very passionate person and I like to learn,” she says. “People took (away) that opportunity for me to learn, and now I’m in college and I wanna take advantage of that. Because this is my education.”