What We Do

Protecting Every Child's Right to Learn How to Read

We are a grassroots movement driven by families concerned with the limited access to educational interventions for students with dyslexia or at risk of dyslexia.

What we do

Advocate for individual students at their public school district
Work with schools to resolve problems and implement solutions
Organize parent support groups
Offer parent advocacy training workshops
Organize teacher training in multi-sensory programs and approaches
Organize school psychologist training to identify dyslexia
Multi-Sensory summer reading camps
Mandatory Implementation and Impact programs for the entire school district
Remediation programs for women in prison

Our Impact

Grassroots movement

We are a grassroots movement driven by families concerned with the limited access to educational interventions for students with dyslexia or at risk of dyslexia. 

We empower parents and raise dyslexia awareness by advocating for individual students at their school districts.

We organize professional training for teachers and follow-up with mentoring. We organize professional training for school psychologists. We provide school Implementation and Impact Services to increase levels of reading skills from students with dyslexia to entire school districts.

Results

Advocated Students

Only one school district refused to provide services to teach a child how to read

Trained Teachers

Psychologists Trained to Identify Dyslexia

Our approach

Dyslexia Advocacy Action Group (DAAG) is a registered 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 fare and appropriate education. Poor reading levels lead to behavioral problems, detachment, poverty, incarceration, ill health, vulnerability to addiction, suicide and environmental degradation.

DAAG advocates to increase literacy levels for students with dyslexia/at risk of dyslexia and general education students by advocating for individual students, holding parent support groups and partnering with schools to provide inexpensive training for school teachers and psychologists. Every school district that participates in our training programs also receive our school Implementation and Impact Services (IIS).

Untreated dyslexia is a symptom of a much larger misunderstanding about how to teach reading.

Implementation & Impact Services (IIS)

Our IIS programs support school districts by supporting teachers. Our professional development workshop is for the entire school district.
Our not-for-profit services clear the barriers created by beliefs about dyslexia and how children learn to read.
Our expert scheduling strategies enable students with disabilities to get the services they need without compromising the fidelity of multi-sensory structured literacy programs or exclusion from subjects that are important to them.

Breaking the school to prison pipeline

One of our main projects is to identify dyslexia in women and organize remediation services in prisons in NYS. Prison reform needs to include screening specifically for dyslexia and teaching people in prison how to read.
Some statistics:
▸ 70- 85% of people in prison cannot read (National Assessment of Adult Literacy)
▸ 38-45% of people in prison have dyslexia (Moody, 2000)
▸ 80% of youths brought before the courts have low reading skills (National Assessment of Adult Literacy)

Mija Ali and Ameer Baraka talk about dyslexia and its impact at school and in prison