My story started with a mother’s relentless drive to open up the world of opportunities for her children and help them discover and embrace their true potential…no matter what obstacles stood in their way. Walking through our own family journey with both dyslexia and autism has helped provide me with a unique perspective into the hearts and minds of children who have been born into this wonderful world of neurodivergence.
I knew, for many years, that my child was struggling to read proficiently. But, as an educator I also knew that he was not struggling enough to need special education services. Our family was caught in the grey area in the middle, as many families are.
Our child was not struggling enough to get extra help through special education and he was exited from reading interventions after only one year. He was so good at using coping skills that his teachers didn’t even realize that he was struggling to read. But….he knew, and it was affecting his self esteem.
As I began to look into ways to help my son, I realized how limited our options were. There was nothing available in our rural northwestern Wisconsin area and the closest options were about an hour away, very expensive, and did not specialize in children with dyslexia. And…getting a medical diagnosis proved to be very complicated and confusing with many hoops that we had to jump through.
That got me thinking….If I, as a veteran teacher, with a master’s degree in reading, was struggling this much to navigate the dyslexia world, how in the world was the average parent supposed to know how to best help their child.
So began my passionate journey to become an expert in dyslexia. I went back to college and took graduate classes to obtain my certificate in Dyslexia and other Language Based Learning Disabilities. I began tutoring my son, twice a week, using the Orton-Gillingham methods that I had just been trained in. In my school, where I worked as a reading intervention teacher, I began to weave in some of these new techniques into my reading intervention groups and saw great progress.
But…I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to be able to do more to help students who were silently struggling like my son was. I decided that the time had come. I wanted to be able to provide one-on-one tutoring to struggling students who showed signs of dyslexia and bring this valuable resource to our rural area in northwestern Wisconsin.
