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Success Story: Port Perry High School, Port Perry, ON

Port Perry High School's special education department has experienced astounding success with its special needs students. They have developed a Supplemental Tutorial Program that is designed to help students who have been identified as reading disabled. Despite intensive support in elementary schools, this group of 22 students is 3 to 9 grades behind in their reading comprehension skills. Each student in this group is faced with the same learning challenge - Dyslexia.

Dyslexic children and adults have difficulty developing an awareness that spoken and written words are comprised of phonemes - basic units of sound that cannot be broken into smaller component sounds. There is a "glitch" in the neurological wiring in the brain of Dyslexics that prevents them from linking letters to their corresponding sounds. Individuals who do not struggle with the challenges of Dyslexia can detect the underlying sounds or phonemes in a word – most Dyslexic learners cannot.

Bob Almack, a Learning Support Teacher at Port Perry, is the head of the Supplemental Tutorial Program. Through the program he provides group and one-to-one instruction to help Port Perry's Dyslexic population achieve grade level improvements in reading comprehension ability. The Academy of Reading is the principle program Mr. Almack has been using over the past nine years - and with great success.

"The Academy of Reading is effective because it trains the reading centers of the brain that Dyslexics can't use. The phonemic training and auditory match exercises train the occipital and parietal lobes of the brain. This is what makes this software so effective: it trains the phoneme producer, the word analyzer and the automatic detector to the point of fluency."

According to Yale neurologist Dr. Sally Shaywitz, Dyslexia afflicts twenty percent of school age children. Based upon Bob Almack's 20+ years in special education, in both elementary and secondary panels, he would claim dyslexia and reading problems are without question the biggest cause of reading disabilities in identified and non-identified at risk students.Mr. Almack feels that Dyslexia's "impact is devastating for those students."

However, with the help of dedicated teachers and effective tools, Dyslexic students are able to make strong progress towards overcoming this challenging reading disability.