Judy Small, of Finksburg, grew steadily more frustrated each day when her son, Billy, would come home from school crying.
“His spirit was wounded every day,” she said. “He was labeled stupid by other kids.”
Billy, 10, suffers from dyslexia and required instruction outside of the public school system, she said.
This year, he found solace and one-on-one tutoring at the Merritt Dyslexia Education Center, one of three schools in the state that serves the educational needs of students with dyslexia.
Also known as the Friendship School, the Eldersburg facility celebrated the grand opening of its new building this weekend.
Around 100 people attended the ribbon-cutting and time-capsule ceremony Friday and watched as students performed a skit that shared a message to which many dyslexic children could relate: “Don?t judge anyone.”
Baltimore businessman Leroy Merritt contributed $1 million to the $4 million project through his Merritt Properties LLC and Merritt Charitable Trust.
His daughter and grandson are dyslexic.
Dyslexia is a neurological learning disability that is characterized by difficulties with fluent word recognition and poor spelling and decoding abilities, according to the International Dyslexia Association.
Merritt, whose company rents out buildings and industrial office space, said he visited the school?s previous ? and four-times smaller ? location at a shopping center along Old Georgetown Boulevard.
“I saw how much the children loved their teachers and how they hugged,” Merritt said.
“They needed a better place to learn.”
The school began with 10 children working in a basement. It moved into a church and then a strip mall. Now at the school?s new location, it serves 57 students, grades 1 to 8, from all over the Baltimore region.
The newest facility could allow enrollment to double in size, said Neill Robson, president of the school?s board, father of a dyslexic son and dyslexic himself.
Thirty percent of all students suffer from some form of language-learning disability, he said.
And, because students sometimes act out in frustration, dyslexia is often misdiagnosed as a behavioral problem, such as laziness or even a lack of intelligence despite the higher-than-average IQs many dyslexic students possess, parents said.
As the school evolved, so have the students and their families.
Trina Minor was called a bad parent when her kindergarten-age son violently hit third-graders.
But her son, Curtis, now 9, has blossomed from an angry boy fed up with not knowing how to read to a school-loving student who educates other children in his neighborhood about dyslexia.
