San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
LOCAL DYSLEXIA SCHOOL OFFERS NEW LEASE ON LEARNING
Newbridge in Poway says its methods can benefit all students
Pam Provenzano did all the right things to get her son to read.
The San Diego mom took him to preschool for two years and kindergarten for two more years. She made sure he was read to since birth.
But by his second year of kindergarten, he still couldn’t read the letters of his own name. He started throwing up at night so he wouldn’t have to go to school the next day, Provenzano said.
She had him tested and learned he has severe dyslexia, a neurological disorder that makes reading difficult. Some experts estimate 5 to 15 percent of children have dyslexia.
The staff at the public school he was attending did not agree he had dyslexia, Provenzano said. One school staff member told Provenzano that dyslexia doesn’t exist.
She said her son received no instruction to address his dyslexia until 2014, when she enrolled him at Newbridge, the only school in San Diego County designed specifically for children with dyslexia and other languagebased disabilities.
Provenzano’s son is now in sixth grade and is reading at grade level, she said. He loves going to school.
“I really do think that Newbridge saved us,” Provenzano said. “He has no problem telling anybody he’s dyslexic, because it’s not a shamed thing.”
Educators Steve Mayo and Margaret Sheftic opened Newbridge in 1996. At Newbridge, they deploy reading approaches that are not often used in public schools but have been found to benefit all students, not just dyslexic students, in learning how to read.
“There’s a lot of research that says this approach works for everybody,” said Mayo, who is also president of the San Diego branch of the International Dyslexia
Association.
Families have commuted from as far as Placentiayorba Linda to attend this school, which has a waiting list of about a dozen students in multiple grades and costs $21,500 a year. About 110 students attend Newbridge.
Many students arrive at Newbridge hating school because nobody had been able to teach them how to read, Mayo said.
If parents believe their children with disabilities are not being properly served by a school district, they can fight to get districts to pay for special private schools like Newbridge. About a third of students who attend Newbridge are public school students whose tuition is being paid by their school districts.
Provenzano said she came to Newbridge after her son’s previous San Diego public school gave him a special education plan that didn’t acknowledge he had dyslexia. The school instead claimed he had ADHD and had him pull tissues and cotton out of containers as part of his special education services, she said.
When Provenzano first learned about Newbridge, she balked at the high tuition. She changed her mind after her son visited Newbridge for one day then said, “I love it here, can we come back tomorrow?”
She recalled thinking back then: “I don’t know what we have to do or what we’re going to have to do to afford it, but our child needs to be at this school.”
Pounding it out
On a recent Thursday, Newbridge teacher Sokry Koeut taught dyslexic fourth- and fifth-graders about the -er suffix, starting with the word “thunder.”
“Let’s pound it,” Koeut said to her classroom of seven students.
“Thun, der,” the students recited, pounding their fists on their desks with each syllable.
“How many syllables was that?” “Two.”
“First syllable was ‘thun.’ Tap it,” Koeut said.
“Th, uh, n,” the students said, tapping their fingers on their arm with each sound.
“How many sounds was that?” “Three.”
“Pick up your pen, we’re going to write it as we say the word,” Koeut said. “T-h-u-n. Thun.” “What was my second syllable? Der. Tap out der,” Koeut said. “What are the letters?”
“D-e-r,” the students said.
“Good job.”
In many traditional classrooms, students are often taught with a “whole language” approach, where students are expected to more or less memorize words and repeat them, Mayo said.
That kind of approach is disastrous for dyslexic students, he said.
“In the typical [general education] classroom, you still do like, it’s almost a haphazard list of words .… ‘Okay, memorize these 10 words, take a test on Friday. Memorize 10 more words, take a test on Friday,’” Mayo said. “There’s no pattern to it, there’s no structure, there’s no predictability, and so, for our kids with rapid naming issues and memory issues and phonemic awareness issues, it’s like it’s a crap shoot honestly.”
Newbridge’s approaches for teaching language are based in what’s called the Orton-gillingham approach, which dates to the 1930s. Many dyslexia experts say that Orton-gillingham, and other so-called “structured literacy” approaches that relate to it, are some of the most effective ways to teach dyslexic students.
With approaches like Orton-gillingham, students drill down into words and letter combinations and learn why words sound and read the way they do.
“Everything is a pattern and a routine,” Mayo said. “There’s predictability and there is repetition, so that you can really lock it into long-term memory.”
Orton-gillingham is sequential, structured and methodical, Sheftic said. Strategies like the “pound and tap” technique turn language into something students can feel, making it easier for them to internalize.
At Newbridge, language arts takes up three periods every day, consisting of a phonics class, a reading class and a writing class.
“For the most part, the whole morning is on these deficit areas, whereas in my brief experience in public schools, you get language arts, that’s one period you’re supposed to do all of this,” said Mayo, who taught in the Chula Vista Elementary School District in the 1980s. “There’s just not enough time.”
On top of setting aside more time to teach language, Newbridge requires extensive training for its teachers.
Teachers go through a week of Orton-gillingham training provided by a national academy every two years. They also do training on visualizing and verbalizing language, and executive functioning strategies like planning and organizing.
“We do a lot of training, a lot lot lot lot,” Mayo said.
Scaling the work
It’s not easy to get a spot at Newbridge. The school is essentially at capacity and does not offer a financial aid program, though Mayo hopes to do so once the school finishes its remodeling project.
As much as Mayo and Sheftic believe their approach can benefit many of the thousands of students in San Diego County who have dyslexia, they have no plans to expand their school, even though many people have asked them to.
“I know there’s a whole lot of kids out there that are just not being served and are in desperate need,” Mayo said. “I get the question, and we think about it all the time.”
Parents have asked Mayo to expand Newbridge, which is K-8, to include high school grades. Mayo refuses because Newbridge’s goal is to prepare students to transition back into traditional schools.
Mayo also worries that if Newbridge were to expand, it would dilute the quality of the school’s instruction, considering how time- and training-intensive it is.
If a student doesn’t attend Newbridge but their family wants the kind of instruction it provides, they would likely have to pay for private tutoring or even pay for an attorney or special education advocate who can help them convince their public school to pay for tutoring or private school as part of a special education plan.
Some San Diego County school districts, including San Diego Unified, say they do not train teachers in Orton-gillingham or other related approaches.
But Mayo said it is possible for school districts to scale a model of dyslexia instruction, even if they have staffing or funding constraints. He is advising one San Diego County district that wants to serve dyslexic students in a structured way.
Mayo said school districts could simply train a handful of teachers — one per school site — then group dyslexic students with that teacher in classes that combine grade levels if necessary.
Part of the problem, Mayo said, is that this approach runs counter to what school districts are told to do with students with disabilities. Districts usually are told to mainstream them and avoid grouping them with other special education kids.
But Mayo doesn’t see Newbridge’s approach as restrictive. Newbridge has general education students and typically developing students who just need help in a specific area: reading.
“If you’re smart and creative, you can make this work, ” Mayo said.