Helping Kids Who Can’t Keep Up

An outgoing young girl withdraws in class, frustrated at her inability to answer questions. A bright, exceptionally articulate little boy is unable to learn to read. An unusually creative 11-year-old forgets what she’s doing from one moment to the next and is so socially inept that she has no friends.

They are the kids who can’t keep up, the lonely kids, the kids who get in fights and disrupt class, or are picked on and bullied. Teachers often don’t have time for them. They’re called “lazy” and “stupid” by adults and peers. Soon, they believe it.

The subject of learning disabilities is often reduced to a polarizing, sound-bite debate over the rising use of Ritalin and other drugs to treat them. The documentary, “Misunderstood Minds,” however, airing at 10 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV, is an intimate, compelling reminder of the anguish and long-lasting damage suffered by children whose learning and behavioral problems are very real.

It is also an encouraging look at how lives can turn around when help is forthcoming.

Produced and directed by “Frontline” filmmaker Michael Kirk, and hosted by ABC “Nightline” correspondent Chris Bury, the report spans three years in the lives of five children and their families. It also hears from the doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, speech and language pathologists.

Most of the five have hopeful results; one teenage boy’s future is less certain. His serious learning disability wasn’t caught until the seventh grade, and years of depression and anger have taken a heavy toll.

The urgent lessons in this thought-provoking documentary are that learning disabilities are as varied as their treatments and that early intervention can make a vital difference in the lives of children and their families.