As previously published in Desert Exposuredyslexia title copy

In 1999, Jake R. sat in the front row of his eighth-grade science class. He listened to everything his teacher, Mrs. Ogilvie said. He was a smart boy who had never demonstrated any behavior problems in the classroom.

So why, thought Ogilvie, is he sitting there with his hoodie pulled over his head and refusing to pick up his pencil and work on the test?

When she kept Jake after class to talk with him, his answer stunned her.

With his hoodie still shielding his eyes, and a single tear slipping down his cheek, Jake told Mrs. O, “I can’t read it. I can’t read the words.”

How could an eighth-grade boy have gotten this far in school without anybody realizing he couldn’t read? she wondered. How did I miss this before now? How did we all miss this?

These questions set Ogilvie, a veteran teacher with the Silver Consolidated School District in Silver City, New Mexico, on a mission of inquiry. She would learn that Jake, like one in five children, struggles with a complex reading disorder called dyslexia that it has nothing to do with intelligence or motivation, but has everything to do with how the brain processes information. What started out as a question and concern over one student would morph into a passion that would drive Ogilvie’s every waking hour, leading her toward becoming a founding member of the only place in Silver City, New Mexico established to help children with this disorder: The Learning Center for Dyslexia and Academic Success.

A Language Based Learning Disorder
Many people, when hearing the word ‘dyslexia,’ think of a child who reverses letters or reads words backwards.

While reversals are common to people with dyslexia, it is not the defining characteristic. The fact that a person perceives and processes information differently in the language centers of the brain, despite average or better intelligence, is what defines this disorder.

What this means is that even though a person’s vision is fine, when looking at words on a page, the text might appear to jump around. Or, a person might not be able to tell the difference between letters that look similar in shape such as /o/, /e/ and /c/. Letters and words might appear to be all bunched together, or jumbled and out of order, with some words appearing completely backward, so that instead of seeing,
The dog and the cat ran into the garden.
they see something like:

Thepog andthetac nar into the gdenar.
Or a person might perceive the letters just fine, but despite having plenty of phonics instruction, they cannot connect individual letters to their corresponding sound.
No matter how smart a person is, no matter how much intelligence they have been blessed with, when language-based information is not perceived or processed accurately, reading is hard, if not downright impossible, to master.

What was most important to Ogilvie as she learned about dyslexia, was finding out that with good instruction and early diagnosis and treatment, people with dyslexia can overcome the challenges it presents. What was needed, she knew, was someplace in Silver City, New Mexico where this early diagnosis and instruction could be found. But as the years rolled by, no such place existed and she continued to recognize students in her classes who were struggling.

Not a Matter of Motivation or Intelligence
Richard LaVoie, a nationally known expert in understanding and teaching children with learning disabilities, offers parents and teachers profound insights into the world of these children. In a workshop called, “How Difficult Can This Be?” he waves around a check for one hundred dollars and offers it anyone in the workshop who can successfully perform a task. Whether the task is a reading one or a visual perception one, it is impossible to complete without some sort of direct instruction or additional information. In a reading passage, a significant number of words are omitted, and others are blurry, squished together, and contain an inconsistent pattern of letter and word reversals. In a visual perception task, it is impossible to see what the picture is, until he places an overlay over the page which clearly outlines what before was just a blur.

“Are you motivated?” LaVoie asks his stunned (and uncomfortably embarrassed) audience. “Of course you are. But no matter how motivated you are, you still can’t perform the task, can you?”

With his audience engaged in rapt silence, LaVoie goes on to make one of his most important points of the workshop. After explaining that too often parents and teachers blame the child for not succeeding, he states, “Motivation only enables us to do, what to the best of our ability, we are already capable of doing.”

As participants grasp that often it is not a matter of won’t, but a matter of can’t, practically visible light bulbs go off in the head of every person there. For the first time they are beginning to understand that the sons, daughters and students who have so frustrated them, are not unmotivated; they are not just being lazy or disinterested. There is something else going on that explains why they are not making progress in reading; why their handwriting is so terrible; why they know something one day, but not the next; why they have sequencing problems, trouble rhyming words, and mix up their right and left hands. There is an explanation that has nothing to do with motivation or intelligence for why they seem so easily distracted, can’t spell to save their life, can’t tell time (unless it’s digital), and why they can’t seem to master basic phonics.

And the explanation has to do with how they perceive and process, or don’t perceive and process, information.

Brains Wired Differently
If you’ve ever blown out a knee, had a cancer scare, a concern about your heart or liver, or sustained an injury to your brain, it is likely your doctor prescribed an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) in order to get a detailed look at the structure of those organs. When it comes to the brain however, an MRI can’t give you a real-time log of brain activity; it can’t tell you how brain activity changes as you engage in various tasks. But something called a functional MRI (fMRI) can. An fMRI can show what parts of the brain are active when you are reading and writing and it can show if there is a disruption in the neural processes needed for those tasks.

There are three neural systems involved in reading and dyslexic readers show a pattern of activation in their brain that is very different from what is observed in fluent readers. In dyslexic readers, when given a passage to read, the anterior system is overactivated, while the two posterior systems are underactivated. This pattern of underactivation of the left posterior reading system is now referred to as the “neural signature” for dyslexia because it is so consistently measured in the brains of individuals with this reading disability.

Although dyslexia is not something a person outgrows, fMRI’s have been able to demonstrate that the provision of specific, research-based reading intervention at an early age, facilitates the development of the neural systems needed to be a fluent reader.

So what about Jake?

Tamara Ogilvie and Building Success, LLC
The day that Ogilvie watched Jake cry because he couldn’t read the test questions, set her on a path of learning that continues today. Since that time she has obtained a master’s degree in teaching reading, completed a two-year intensive program in teaching students with dyslexia, become certified in testing for dyslexia and enrolled in a graduate program to receive her degree as an educational diagnostician.

And in 2008, armed with information, strategies, and a clear sense that she was being called upon by her Higher Power to reach out to these children, Ogilvie resigned from teaching in the public schools and opened Building Success, LLC—a tutoring and education service specializing in teaching children with dyslexia.

In a small office on Pope Street, Ogilvie began to get word out that she was available to tutor students. Fiona Bailey, a teacher and the parent of a daughter with dyslexia, discovered Ogilvie when her daughter Margaret was in the fourth grade. Prior to that, with no tutors or teachers in town specializing in this disorder, Bailey had to act as both advocate and tutor to her daughter, who had been diagnosed in the second grade, only after Bailey finally took her to Las Cruces for formal testing. Finding Ogilvie, a teacher highly skilled in teaching dyslexic children was, "a Godsend,” says Bailey. “It was such a relief to finally feel like we weren’t in this all alone. I had been tutoring Margaret for so long, and she really just wanted me to be her mom, not her tutor. Tamara gave Margaret her mommy back and brought her up to grade level in reading."

As awareness of her approach to teaching grew, more and more kids found their way to Ogilvie’s office. In 2010, in addition to the intensive one on one instruction Ogilvie provided during the school year, she offered a three week summer program which targeted student’s deficit skills, but in a more social setting. She recruited two other teachers and that first summer, the Building Success Summer Program served fifteen students.

By 2012, Ogilvie had secured a team of teachers, all with master’s degrees in reading and extensive teaching experience, to provide intensive skill development to what had by then grown to fifty summer students.

Ogilvie’s dream of helping students with dyslexia had manifested, but she felt like it wasn’t enough. There were too many students needing services and just her to offer after school intervention during the school year. She needed funding; she needed time to write grants and seek donations; she needed a bigger building. She needed her tutoring services to be so much more than just tutoring.

“What I need,” she thought, “is a miracle.”

Enter George Lundy and the Freemasons
Just about the time that Ogilvie was spending sleepless nights wondering how to accomplish her mission of providing comprehensive services to children with dyslexia, George Lundy, a longstanding member and leader within the Silver City Masonic Lodge, was looking for a focus and a mission.

Freemasons belong to the oldest and largest fraternal organization in the world and their primary purpose is to make good men better in order to make the world a better place. The Freemasons of North America contribute over two million dollars a day to charitable causes, with the most well-known of the Masons being the Shrine Masons (Shriners), who operate the country’s largest network of hospitals for burned and orthopedically impaired children. Another well-known member of the Masonic family are the Scottish Rite Masons, who operate a network of over 150 Language Disorder Clinics, Centers and Programs for children with language-based learning disorders. One of these programs is The Scottish Rite Masonic Children’s Learning Center of Las Cruces, which has been in operation since 1989. This Center offers services to any child with dyslexia as well as a comprehensive training program for teachers.

When Lundy discovered Judy Carter, the Children’s Learning Center of Las Cruces’ director since 1997, he knew he had found both a mission and a focus for the Masonic Lodge: bring the benefits of that program to the children of Silver City.

But once they had their focus, the Masons knew they needed to find someone capable of directing the kind of program that would offer the same hope and help to the children of Silver City as was being offered in Las Cruces. Finding such a teacher seemed an impossible task. Where, in their small town of 10,000, would the Masons find somebody with the specialized skills, experience, credentials and passion needed to run a center for children with dyslexia?

“What we need,” Lundy thought, “is a miracle.”

Miracles happen:
The Learning Center for Dyslexia and Academic Success

When George Lundy and Bill Nagel spent time with Judy Carter at the Scottish Rite Learning Center in Las Cruces in order to learn as much as they could about the program, she mentioned the name of a woman that might be a good contact for them. That woman told the two Masons about an ex-public school teacher who had an office on Pope Street, where she tutored children with dyslexia. That person was, of course, Tamara Ogilvie.

“And the rest,” Lundy says with a smile, “is history.”

Lundy contacted Ogilvie and right away it was clear that she and the Silver City Freemasons shared both a vision and a passion. After their first, electrically charged and emotional meeting in 2010, Lundy, Nagel and Ogilvie went to work in earnest to make that vision a reality.

Word went out, and over the next year a board of directors was formed, with one of those directors being Fiona Bailey, the elementary school teacher and mother whose daughter receives tutoring from Ogilvie. The other board members include retired teachers, an accountant, a University professor, business owners, and a retired Educational Occupational Therapist. Bylaws were developed for what is now formally called, The Learning Center for Dyslexia and Academic Success, and informally called, TLC (The Learning Center).

Each of the nine board members of TLC comes with his or her own area of expertise, but the one thing they all share is a passion and a belief in the mission of TLC, which is to, 1) Provide funding so that teachers can receive the training they need in the methods and curriculums proven successful with dyslexic students, 2) Provide parents and community members with support and information about dyslexia, and 3) Offer financial support in the way of scholarships to parents who want to send their children to programs which are offering the kind of multisensory instruction and research-based curriculums that will help their children become successful readers and writers.

TLC received their nonprofit, 501 (c)(3) status and obtained a building where they set up a program that provides research-based, comprehensive intervention to students who are struggling in school. They contract with Tamara Ogilvie for provision of these services, and the summer program, now a project of TLC, anticipates an enrollment of over seventy-five this summer.

With donated monies from Silver City Masonic Lodge Number 8, TLC has been able to pay the tuition for Ogilvie to complete the two-year intensive training program that Judy Carter offers to teachers who want to utilize the Take Flight program with dyslexic students. The Mason’s donations to TLC allow them to continue to fund educators who want to become certified in this research-based, time-tested curriculum.

TLC has also provided scholarships to families who wanted, but could not afford, to have their child or children in Ogilvie’s summer program, and they have provided training for tutors in the Literacy Link Leamos Organization. In 2012, TLC sponsored two teachers’ attendance at the SW Branch of the International Dyslexia Association annual conference, and they continue to engage in fund raising activities that will allow them to expand their services to dyslexic children and their families.

According to George Lundy and other board members, TLC is still in its infancy. “We want to be able to provide comprehensive services to kids, but we also want to be a place where parents and community members can receive information and training about this disability.”

Coaching Isn’t Just for Sports Anymore
Ogilvie likes to think of herself as more coach than tutor because, “Kids are about more than just their language-based learning disability. The kids I work with are incredibly smart and talented and creative. I have to help students believe in themselves and provide a learning environment in which they can be successful. A great deal of trust must be established to be able to make progress with a student because they must be willing to take risks and step outside their comfort zones. A coach is seen as someone building up someone’s skills and physical abilities without the implied deficit. I am required to motivate, nurture, instruct, and correct my students as they make slow but steady progress toward their goals.”

Ogilvie goes on to say, "My students can learn to read, spell and write, but they will learn to do those things differently than other student because of the way their brain processes information. By using research-based strategies that build up the neural processes—kids can overcome the challenges. It takes time; it’s not easy, but then, nobody became a world class gymnast or football player without hard work and daily practice. It’s no different. And just like in sports, it’s best to start kids in their training when they are young."

Margaret Bailey, a sixth-grade student at Calvary Christian Academy, has been tutored by Ogilvie for the past two years. “Having dyslexia makes things harder,” she says. “But with Mrs. Ogilvie we learn strategies.”

Young Margaret Bailey goes on to say, “Some people might treat you differently (if they know you have it), but you just have to figure out how to tell them you have dyslexia."

The Gift of Dyslexia
There are many famous people known to have dyslexia and Ron Davis, author of the bestselling book, The Gift of Dyslexia, believes they are not geniuses in spite of their dyslexia, but because of it; that what is at the root of a person’s difficulties with the written and sometimes spoken, word, is also what is at the essence of their creativity and brilliance in other areas. Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Steven Spielberg, Cher, Thomas Edison, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, John F. Kennedy and Dan Malloy, the current governor of Connecticut, are just a few of the well-known people with dyslexia.

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