Undiagnosed, ignored

Holly Neal was a fifth-grader when she opened a dictionary and discovered she was different. Her Sudbury class was copying definitions, and most kids went word by word or phrase by phrase. Neal slogged along letter by letter.

In later grades, she enrolled in honors classes and earned decent marks, but still had to work harder than her peers. She scribbled notes desperately in class and stayed awake into the early morning doing homework. Once, she fell asleep at the kitchen table as she spent the night trying to organize her research into a history paper.

''I felt out of control a lot, because I felt I was constantly under the gun," says Neal, noting that her driven, sometimes hyper behavior in school earned her the nickname ''Hurricane Holly."

She didn't find out until her sophomore year that her differences stemmed from learning disabilities. A screening revealed that she was dyslexic and had an auditory processing disorder. She didn't see words or hear them the same way her peers did.

Neal, now 33, leads workshops for Boston's Federation for Children with Special Needs and teaches ''self advocacy" training for adolescents. She considers herself a part of a neglected group: students who go through most of their schooling struggling because no one has picked up on their learning disability. Most people with learning disabilities are identified early on, but others with milder disabilities sometimes slip by undetected, says Neal, educators, and other advocates for the disabled.

Some may be gifted and mask their disabilities because they can memorize with ease and master concepts in the early grades. These students don't falter till they reach high school, when their inability to organize information trips them up, said Arlington family therapist Howard Wolfe.

Others manage to pass classes through the early grades, then grow frustrated and drop out in high school, said Teresa Citro, executive director of Learning Disabilities Worldwide, an advocacy group.

''That is really tragic," Citro said, ''because we are literally discarding bright minds. And these are all bright minds."

But educators and psychologists are skeptical that some students diagnosed with disabilities as teens actually have them. They chalk up the majority to panicking parents or families seeking to ''game the system" for advantages such as untimed SATs.

''When someone says 'mild learning disability' to me, it's sort of like 'mildly pregnant,' " said Douglas Fuchs, a special education professor at Vanderbilt University. ''My hunch is that a majority of kids in question fall very much into this theme of kids kind of giving up on high school, parents get upset, and they have the kids tested."

The diagnostic tools schools use muddies the situation, particularly if the student undergoing the analysis is an adolescent. Schools typically test a student for learning disabilities if there's a significant gap between a student's ability (usually determined with an IQ test) and his or her achievement in school. They look for various warning signs, including struggles with homework, giving up on school, behavior problems, and unexpected failure. Those same signs can appear if a teen is dealing with family stress, substance abuse, depression, or conflict with parents who have a different view on the importance of education.

''All it is," said clinical psychologist Jerome Schultz, director of the Learning Lab at Lesley University, ''is a sign that says we'd better look into this further."

Students who were diagnosed with learning disabilities as teens say the problems are all too real.

Kristen Salera spent many nights working till 2 a.m. on homework in elementary and middle school and many hours with private tutors before she was diagnosed with a language-based learning disability towards the end of eighth grade. ''I would read something and then have no idea what I'd just read. I'd have friends explain things to me. I didn't get much sleep," Salera said. ''I would do flash cards and study for hours, and I'd still get 60 or 70 percent on my tests, and I'd think, what is wrong with me?"

Salera, 21, is now a senior at Curry College in Milton, where she enrolled in a program set up to help students with learning disabilities. She meets regularly with a mentor to find out what learning techniques work best for her. She has used books on tape and color coded information, and tried ''splatting," a brainstorming method, to come up with ideas for papers.

Neal, in her workshops, teaches teens to figure out what learning styles suit them best and to advocate for them with their teachers and employers. She also encourages them to find mentors like she did in high school and at Brigham Young University, where she earned a degree in history and education.

''I started being more open about where I had difficulties, instead of just being confused and not wanting to tell anybody," Neal said.

''In high school, there's kind of an assumption that it's caught when you're younger. The thing that people don't realize is that you've been able to come up with ways to compensate," Neal said. ''But when the workload gets to a point where you can't compensate, that's when the real frustration and anger starts happening and you just say, 'Forget it.' "

Neal, who also earned a certificate to teach special education, urges students to develop a different view of failure and realize that conquering their problems can lead them to success later.

''Most successful people usually fail many times in life," she said.