Statement of Purpose:

Advocate to ensure students with dyslexia, LD students and students at risk of dyslexia learn how to read; this will help prevent poverty, incarceration, poor health, vulnerability to addiction, suicide and environmental degradation.  Advocate to increase literacy levels for students with dyslexia/at risk of dyslexia and general education students by facilitating robust scientific evidence-based multi-sensory programs and approaches at public schools, colleges, private schools, prisons and drug rehabs.

We are a grassroots movement driven by families concerned with the limited access to educational interventions for dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities within our public schools. We aim to raise dyslexia awareness, empower families and teachers to support students and inform policy-makers on best practices to identify and remediate students with dyslexia/LD or students at risk of dyslexia in our public schools.

​Our Basic Goals:

• Connect parents on Long Island who are concerned with the limited dyslexia services in public schools. 
• Partner with parent advocacy and education resources to help parents obtain appropriate services for their children at school.
• Educate parents on processes at state and federal level to improve literacy standards (training and programs) at schools for all children.
• Provide information and resources to enable parents to work with schools to identify, educate and support children at risk of dyslexia.

Our long Term Goals:
To ensure students with dyslexia and students at risk of dyslexia learn to read. To address the underlying issues that enable high numbers of regular students to suffer low literacy levels - a major cause of academic failure. Parents and their children have been mostly left to their own devices to solve this fundamental need. Implementing programs to overcome these barriers by effectively addressing them at the first indications of dyslexia/risk of dyslexia in children in the elementary school level is a basic mandate of this proposal. Empowering our students will help prevent poverty, incarceration, poor health, vulnerability to substance abuse, suicide and environmental degradation. 
 
We propose to work to increase literacy levels for students with dyslexia/at risk of dyslexia by facilitating robust scientific evidence-based multi-sensory programs and approaches at public schools, colleges, private schools, prisons and drug rehabilitation programs.
 
Recommendations to achieve these goals are as follows:

• Organize/provide cost effective training for educational psychologists including implementation procedures/practices that identify students with dyslexia or at risk of dyslexia before second grade.

 

• Organize/provide cost effective training/implementation procedures/practices including mentoring for teachers/special education teachers so they may administer scientific evidence-based multi-sensory structured literacy approaches/programs to fidelity for students with dyslexia or at risk of dyslexia.

 

• Organize/provide donation-based / cost effective scientific evidence-based reading/spelling programs/approaches to low-income and under-served areas of New York State.

 

• Inform and educate parents, teachers, educational psychologists, administrators and students about how untreated dyslexia can result in symptoms such as anxiety, lack of ability to focus, low self-esteem and behavior issues.

 

• Provide resources/training in structured literacy approaches/programs and mentoring for general education school teachers to improve literacy standards at public schools for all students.

 

• Provide resources for students with dyslexia applying for college and adults for further education.

 

• Advocate/organize/provide educational evaluations and structured literacy programs/approaches including mentoring for people in prison/drug and alcohol rehabs with dyslexia and at risk of dyslexia.

 

• Advocate for special education service transparency that involves public disclosure of teachers trained in scientific evidence-based multi-sensory structured literacy programs/approaches including the level of certification at public schools. 

 

• Provide/organize environmental nature conservation projects and outdoor fitness/group-building activities to bring students with dyslexia together so they may identify with their peers and increase self-esteem.