Sound Shore

MAMARONECK — A Mamaroneck family is suing the school district in federal court, accusing it of failing to meet its dyslexic son’s needs and giving misleading reports about his progress.

“They were negligent,” the boy’s mother, Susan Hynes, said. “They should have known they weren’t capable of handling somebody as severely disabled as him and told us that he wasn’t progressing.”

Hynes wants the district to foot the bill for her son Ian’s education at an upstate private school that charges $53,000 a year. But the districts has refused, saying it can handle the boy’s needs.

The family’s complaint, which is pending in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks unspecified damages and full tuition reimbursement for Ian’s time at The Gow School in South Wales. (Read the district’s legal response.)

Ian was independently diagnosed in 2008 as having double-deficit dyslexia, spatial impairments and ADHD, a rare combination that occurs in about 5 percent of the dyslexic population nationwide, the complaint states.

Hynes claims that when Ian, now a rising senior at Gow, enrolled in sixth grade at Hommocks Middle School in 2005, his reading skills were below the third-grade level — but that teachers assured her they could bring him up to speed. Over the next three school years, his report cards indicated that he was making slow, steady progress at Hommocks.

But when the family had him independently tested at the NYU Child Study Center in 2008, the results painted a different picture: In eighth grade, Ian was still reading at just a third-grade level.

A local hearing officer supported Ian’s placement at Gow, but the district appealed that decision, and a state reviewer sided with the district in April 2010. The Hynes family filed its lawsuit four months later.

Hynes believes the district actually slowed Ian’s progress by giving him shorter tests and inflating his grades. After a year at Gow, she said, Ian was reading at an eighth-grade level.

District spokeswoman Debbie Manetta did not respond to a phone message by press time Thursday.