Written by Heidi Stoffel, Dyslexia Practitioner and Executive Director of Aspire Academy. Cofounder of Decoding Dyslexia Iowa.
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, and Aspire Academy wants to focus on the lack of access to dyslexia services in the state of Iowa.
Onpoint, an NPR show hosted by Megnhna Chakrabarti, recently cast a spotlight on how getting a diagnosis of dyslexia is unaffordable for most families in the United States. Very few schools in our nation diagnose it, and although it affects 1 in 5 children, only 5% of children ever receive a diagnosis, and only 1% get the help they need. Click the link to the podcast to learn more… Rethinking How Dyslexia Gets Diagnosed – Onpoint.
This podcast, however, did not go far enough. Not only is it expensive to receive a diagnosis, the lack of effective services after getting the diagnosis is even a bigger road block. Private tutoring for dyslexia is uncommon, but it is the key ingredient to getting children with moderate to severe dyslexia reading, writing and spelling. The dyslexia tutoring centers in Iowa have to train themselves in the specialized dyslexia programs and be dedicated to learning these programs with fidelity. Then the centers must train any tutor employed by them in these programs and subsidize their certifications so they can teach students these programs.
Very few Iowa schools train their special education and classroom teachers to support students with dyslexia. Teachers have to spend $15,000 dollars in Iowa to take Master Degree classes to be able to provide dyslexia services to their students. The Iowa Legislature did not pass a bill to fund scholarships for teachers who want to attain this degree.
10 years ago, in the Des Moines Metro Area, there were no schools offering Intensive Structured Literacy for students with dyslexia, and there was only one private tutor offering Intensive Structured Literacy Services (The Orton-Gillingham Method). The AEAs in Iowa wouldn’t acknowledge dyslexia.
Heidi Stoffel, Johnston, Iowa mother of a dyslexic son, had to drive 45 minutes, one way to access the services her son needed. Round-trip, this was 90 minutes in the car, and it had to be done twice a week for three years.
Heidi became motivated to make dyslexia services more widely available so she started Decoding Dyslexia Iowa and two dyslexia learning centers between 2013 and 2017. Even then, the cost of providing these services to families, makes it something only families with large incomes can afford.
When 20% of the population has a disorder, with a known treatment that works, it is amazing that even 11 years after the Decoding Dyslexia state movement began, Iowa is still lagging in services for this population…both in school and private tutoring. This is not due to a lack of will by parents and teachers, but a lack of funding and leadership by our state government.
Solutions?
1)More Screening for Dyslexia. Dyslexia is very common, and the symptoms are very predictable. Two tests that take 90 minutes to give can screen for it and identify if a child needs an Intensive Structured Literacy program to attain grade-level reading. These two tests are taught in the Iowa Dyslexia Specialist Endorsement Class, however, it is again very expensive for teachers to get this training.
2) Invest in the education of teachers to provide Intensive Structured Literacy in Tier 3 curriculums in Iowa. Waiting for the Iowa Legislature to help has proven ineffective. Currently Aspire Academy is working with the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque (CFGD) to educate teachers on how to identify dyslexia and how to remediate it with Intensive Structured Literacy Programs. CFGD received a generous donation to make access to dyslexia services affordable. Heidi Stoffel, Executive Director of Aspire, trained 17 teachers in 2024, and they are now providing 85 hours of services to students each month. Once the scholarship system becomes activated, Dubuque will be able to deliver 170 hours of services per month to children in their community.
Dyslexia services can expand with the organization of scholarship funds for teachers, schools and students. The Iowa Legislature has not acted nor provided the help needed despite 11 years of requests. We can solve this problem without their help by being more creative in our communities and schools.
Access is a real roadblock to children with dyslexia. Both for diagnoses, and for help after the issue is discovered. We need more even more leadership, organization and creative thinking to help the 20% who need these services to succeed with reading, writing and spelling.