Statement of Purpose

Dyslexia Advocacy Action Group is a not-for-profit that works to ensure students with dyslexia and students at risk of dyslexia learn how to read. Undiagnosed, untreated dyslexia impacts children's emotional wellbeing as well as their ability to receive a free and appropriate education. Reduced reading levels lead to poverty, incarceration, ill health, vulnerability to addiction, suicide, and environmental degradation. We work to increase literacy levels for students with dyslexia/at risk of dyslexia and general education students. We advocate for individual students, hold parent support groups, and organize training events for school teachers and psychologists. We organize training and educational school impact programs 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. We inform policy-makers on best practices to identify and remediate students with dyslexia or students at risk of dyslexia in our public schools.

Our Immediate Goals:

• Connect parents who are concerned with the limited dyslexia services in public schools
• Advocate for individual students at public schools
• Educate parents on processes at the state and federal levels to improve literacy standards (training and programs) at schools for all children
• Organize teacher & psychologist training
• Organize school district educational resources on 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 at the elementary school level is an essential 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 structured literacy 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.
• 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.