Reading turns woman’s life around
With
its nationally ranked universities and thriving science and engineering hubs,
San Diego County is increasingly known as a place for smart people. More than
60 percent of those who move here now have college degrees, according to one
recent study.
It’s
also home to almost a half-million adults who are illiterate. They can’t help
their kids with homework, can’t fill out job applications, can’t read this
story.
Amelia
Sandoval used to be one of them.
Born
in San Diego, she grew up in a household with a mother who was there in theory
and a father who wasn’t there at all, she said. She was left alone sometimes
with a TV and a cat as companions.
“School,”
she said, “wasn’t really enforced.”
She
stopped going in the fifth grade. Authorities put her in foster care, but she
kept running away to hang out downtown. “I sold drugs, stole stuff and did
whatever I wanted to do,” she said. “I had my own little crew.”
Stints
in Juvenile Hall and child-protection receiving homes didn’t steer Sandoval
from the course she was on. Being unable to read didn’t bother her much,
either. “You don’t need to know how to read to pop open a car,” she said.
═════════►
A
letter she couldn’t read
When
people hear Sandoval’s story, they sometimes ask whether her parents had books
in the home when she was growing up.
“Books?”
she replies. “We were lucky if we had furniture.”
That’s
not unusual among adults who are illiterate, said Valerie Hardie, administrator
for READ/San
Diego, the city library’s adult literacy program, which is where
Sandoval went for help. “They grew up in homes where the parents didn’t read
well, there were no books in the home, and they couldn’t model a life of
learning,” she said.
Others
had health issues as children that took them out of school, or had learning
disabilities that went undiagnosed or were poorly understood. READ
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