Students find reading aid outside school
Group urges method in class; district balks
By Rosemary Shinohara - Anchorage Daily News

August 28, 2000


Every year, dozens of Anchorage parents whose children suffer from learning disabilities pay $5,000 or more for reading lessons at a private clinic.

Launa Burke wanted her son to get the extra help so badly that the then night-shift nurse slept in her car while her 9-year-old son Joshua took lessons inside a clinic off Diamond Boulevard this year.

The program works so well, some parents say, that they want the Anchorage School District to adopt it.

But the district’s special education director says the district can’t subscribe to any one program, such as the Lindamood-Bell reading method praisedby parents, on a broad scale. "It needs to be individualized," Robyn Rehmann said. "We don’t have a purist approach."

Parents Doug and Barb Lefler organized a group this summer to urge the district to make classes that use the nationally known Lindamood-Bell methods more widely available. They will also encourage School Board members to read the national research on effective reading programs.

"The reason we’re feeling like the Lindamood-Bell program is the program of choice is that there’s already proof it works," said Barb Lefler, whose son went through it last spring.

Students get four hours a day of one-on-one instruction at the Emerald Clinic, the private facility that teaches the method. A child’s reading ability often advances by months or years in just four to six weeks of intensive private lessons, the parents say.

 

TEACHING UNDERGOES CHANGES
The parents and Rehmann agree that for many children who can’t read well, the problem is more complicated than knowing phonics, which sounds go with each letter.

The National Reading Panel, a group of experts commissioned by Congress, concluded in a report published in April that even before children learn letters, they must be able to distinguish separate sounds in a word, such as the three sounds in "cat."

Some children can’t pick out individual sounds in the spoken language without specific instruction. There’s a disconnect between their brains and what their ears hear. They can’t tell "cot" from "cat," and they may hear either word as one sound.

Most children learn to distinguish sounds – a skill called phonemic awareness – on their own and do it automatically. If you spoke pig Latin as a child, you were practicing phonemic awareness, taking away the initial sound in a word. If your parents read you Dr. Seuss, you were learning to make rhymes and demonstrating the ability to tell which sounds change.

"There’s never been such an emphasis on phonemic awareness as there is now," said Don Boehmer, special education director for the Kenai Peninsula School District and an educator for 40 years. The district uses Lindamood-Bell for some students.

The national panel, after two years of research, determined that good reading programs teach phonemic awareness and three other kinds of skills: phonics, fluency and accuracy, and comprehension.

In a cover story last November, Newsweek highlighted the Lindamood-Bell program as a success in attacking certain kinds of reading deficits, such as dyslexia, which causes severe reading problems.

"We’re just getting way more sophisticated in looking at why students can’t read," Boehmer said. "I think we’re getting closer and closer to figuring out what’s important and what’s not."

 

HOW LINDAMOOD-BELL WORKS
No single strategy works for everyone. But parents whose children succeed with Lindamood-Bell say it helps not only kids with severe reading problems but also those who need just a little extra attention.

Kit Roberts, who owns Emerald Clinic, said the Lindamood-Bell process teaches children how to think about sounds. When they leave after four to six weeks, they now how to overcome reading obstacles.

"If they leave here and keep reading, use it in school, they just keep getting better," she said.

She hopes the program will take off in the public school system.

Roberts uses Lindamood-Bell techniques to teach children awareness of the way each sound feels in their mouths – the way lips pop to make the "p" sound tongues touch teeth for the "t" sound.

In an hour, children can learn all the consonant sounds that way, she said. In another hour, they’ll get the vowels.

Using colored blocks laid out in row to represent each sound in a word, she helps kids practice the skills. She’ll change one sound – donut to bonut maybe – and ask a child to move the block that represents the new sound.

"You’re thinking about what you’re feeling," Roberts said.

Children figure out the right answers themselves, she said. "You never tell the answer. That doesn’t help them become independent." She said experts estimate that 15 percent to 30 percent of the general population has poor phonemic awareness.

The Anchorage School District serves 49,000 students.

"If 30 percent of the general population has this problem, what’s 30 percent of 49,000 students?" Roberts asked. "There’s a very, very critical need for it."

Yet Barb Lefler said that in the six years that her son Neal has been in Anchorage public schools no one has talked to them about phonemic awareness.

Neal, 17, will be a junior at Dimond this fall. Studying for four hours a day at the Emeral Clinic after school, he advanced his reading ability last spring from the first-grade level to the fourth-grade level.

Joshua Burke, a third-grader last year, read at kindergarten level before he underwent intensive lessons at the Emerald Clinic last spring, his mother said. He advanced about a year in several weeks there, she said.

Any Have, a 17-year-old senior, could read but wasn’t assimilating the information. He improved his grade-point average at Service High from a C- to a B, he said, from his sophomore to junior year using Lindamood-Bell.

 

OTHER DISTRICTS TRY IT
The districts on both sides of Anchorage have each tried Lindamood-Bell programs with different degrees of success.

Early in the 1990s, the Matanuska-Susitna School District used federal money to train teachers in Lindamood-Bell. "It rang true with those teachers," said Karl Schleich, principal of Snowshoe Elementary in Wasilla.

"’Yes, this is the missing piece,’ they thought at the time."

"The results were very, very positive," said Carol Kane, who was then Mat-Su’s director of instruction.

But Mat-Su special education director Mike Melear said it’s hard to tell whether the method worked better than other reading programs because the intensive, small-group instruction advocated by Lindamood-Bell would yield good results no matter what.

"If you take four kids and sit them down for three hours and all you do is reading, their reading skills are going to improve," he said.

Paul Worthington, research director at Lindamood-Bell corporate headquarters in San Luis Obispo, Calif., said the company was just starting to put programs together in Mat-Su when the district hit a fiscal crisis. "It was a success until it got canned," he said.

In any case, the district gave up after about three years because it cost too much to incorporate the methods into individual or small-group lessons and was difficult to keep going as part of regular classrooms, Mat-Su school officials say.

The Kenai district uses Lindamood-Bell programs as part of a package of tools used to rescue students seriously behind, Boehmer said.

Kenai has been conducting a reading project in 16 or its 27 primary schools for four years. Teachers test children and diagnose problems by the end of kindergarten. If a child isn’t progressing in regular reading he’ll get an additional structured reading class called reading mastery. It emphasizes learning the sounds and symbols that make up words. If that doesn’t work well, the child moves into the more intensive Lindamood-Bell program.

Boehmer and Worthington said 60 percent or more of all kids learn to read proficiently with any competent instruction.

Kenai’s goal is for 90 percent of the children who need extra help to be proficient readers by the end of second grade. The district defines proficiency as being able to read 90 words a minute. "We are very close," Boehmer said.

Anchorage also has had a reading goal for the past four years. It aims for all students to be independent readers by the end of third grade. To date, the district hasn’t reported any progress, but an update based on testing last spring is due out this fall.

Rehmann, Anchorage’s special education director, said while only a few Anchorage teachers are trained in Lindamood-Bell techniques, the district trains all primary grade teachers in phonemic awareness as well as a holistic approach to reading, including phonics and good literature.

Teachers are supposed to tailor the programs to each child’s problems.

"There are programs set up to help the teacher change those variables," she said, including one developed by University of Oregon professors that the district uses primarily for children with disabilities.

Under the University of Oregon program, the child gets immediate feedback to correct errors. "It’s very fast action, quickly paced and very structured."

But it’s only one of many programs being used in Anchorage.

Parent Launa Burke said she feels the school system is trying to help her son, but it took the private Emerald Clinic to correctly diagnose his problem and to move him along.

"It’s not that the school hasn’t tried," she said. "But at the same time, they don’t understand how phonemic awareness works with reading."

Burke said her son Joshua is more excited about reading as he prepares to enter fourth grade. "He’s definitely more interested in it. And his confidence went up enormously."

Burke said the district’s expectations for Joshua as a special education student are too low. "He’s met all of his goals all along for the last two years, but he still can’t read well. The goals are not right," she said.

The district’s current goal for him is to read at second-grade level by next February, she said.

"I’d like him to read at grade level," she said, and he’s intelligent enough to do it.