newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — According to statistics from a local tutoring program, 30 to 40 percent of local elementary students do not read up to grade level.

Two veteran special education teachers, Debbie Hawkins and Michele Walker, are on a mission to fix that problem and ensure every child and adult has the opportunity to learn to read both in school and privately. They run a tutoring clinic, Alternate Learning Styles Inc.

The state of Alaska has accepted the Alternate Learning Styles program as a Supplemental Educational Service for public schools, one of a group of programs that helps low-income students for free.

Tutors trained by Walker and Hawkins work with small groups of students at Denali and Hunter Elementary Schools. The program is one of many afterschool programs available to low-income families, but it is the only one in the district that is strictly academic in focus.

“Many people think that when you’re getting reading help it means you’re just reading for two hours each session. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Walker said. Tutors break down learning to read into eight or nine different skill sets that address a variety of skills needed to read a single sentence — including listening to the sounds letters make and sight word recognition, where students connect the sounds of the various letters to form a word.

“We are in daily or weekly face-to-face contact with parents sharing progress, giving suggestions and basically making ourselves available for their students academic needs,” she said. “In many cases, we know students’ teachers, principals or even parents, which can be very helpful when setting up programs and setting goals.”

The afterschool program presents its challenges, Walker said, and it would be better suited if she could work with children during the school day, when they are fresh and energized.

Not only is there a limited amount of time tutors can spend with the students after school, but after a six-hour school day, many children are exhausted, making it difficult for them to concentrate. To keep students motivated, the team of tutors provides healthy snacks like yogurt and low-sugar juice and structured breaks to help children work off their excess energy.

The two women and their team have worked with seven school districts statewide since 2001 using a nationally acclaimed reading program, the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program, that essentially uses all five senses to teach children to read. It’s a relatively innovative approach to reading that allows tutors to be creative in their material while providing a specific framework to help students hear, speak and see sounds that make up words.

“I think the most common mistake is assuming that we’re all wired the same and using the same techniques will not work for everyone,” Walker said. “The next most common mistake is not remediating the specific issue that is causing the problem.”

Between the private tutoring clinic and the after school programs, Alternate Learning Styles works with more than 250 students a year and four to six adults each year.

“Our biggest request is for reading help,” Walker said. “That’s because every area of our lives, be it math or social studies, cooking, or science, is governed by our ability to read and understand.”

When a child is struggling to read, there are certain symptoms parents can look for, according to Walker. For instance, if a child reads abnormally slow or fails to understand basic concepts in the story, he or she might be struggling. Students who are unable to decode the meaning of words, struggle to read aloud or loose their place frequently while reading might also be at risk.

“If a child is exhibiting even a few of these symptoms, he or she probably has some reading difficulties that need to be remediated,” Walker said. “There are so many different kinds of issues that effect reading and writing that it is difficult to pinpoint one thing.”

But after 30 years of working with students with reading difficulties, Walker has found there are four typical problems among aspiring readers: the inability to interpret the differences in sounds, the inability to understand the number of different sounds in a word, the inability to understand the meaning of words and the inability to memorize common words.

Most of these issues start to appear between kindergarten and first grade, but sometimes they aren’t caught in students until junior high or high school.

“I think one of the best things that we can do for all of our students, besides the obvious one of increasing their academic skills, is to give them back their self-esteem and help them realize they can be successful in school now that they have the right tools,” Walker said.

For more information about after school tutoring programs or Alternate Learning Styles, Inc. contact the school district or call 458-READ.