6 Steps to Transforming Your Dyslexia Program 

Austin Independent School District (AISD) successfully transformed its dyslexia program through the power of parent advocacy and expert intervention, offering an achievable roadmap to districts looking for dramatically improved reading results. 

Amber Elenz, a parent-advocate, and Rachel Robillard, PhD, a school neuropsychologist, worked together to overhaul their district’s approach to dyslexia. When they began, AISD was identifying dyslexia in roughly 2% of the district’s 85,000 students. Within 5 years, that figure had risen to over 8%.  

This rise in figures doesn't indicate an increase in dyslexia, but rather a more engaged and accessible identification process. How did they inspire and implement such a positive change? Dr. Robillard and Ms. Elenz share what worked for them—the barriers they faced, strategies they developed, and lessons they learned during their highly successful partnership.  

How did this partnership begin? 

Like so many good stories, this one starts with a child who didn’t fit in. In preschool, Amber Elenz’s son experienced many of the classic effects of dyslexia: auditory processing differences, some disruptive behaviors, and most telling, difficulty learning phonemic and phonological skills. “They would learn a new letter a week, basically. And at six weeks, they would review what they had learned. His teacher looked at me and said, ‘Amber, it was like Groundhog Day. It was like this was his first day of school and he didn't know anything.’”

Download our free poster: Dyslexia Symptoms to Look for When Testing at Different Stages 

Her persistence and an insightful school psychologist led eventually to a dyslexia diagnosis—but his school did not have the resources to provide needed interventions. It was a frustrating roadblock for Elenz and her son.  

“It is the job of a school to teach a child to read,” she says. “If you don’t teach a child to read, they can’t do math. They can’t do science. They can’t do social studies. They can’t do any of the other things that compete for our attention in a school setting.” 

Elenz worked with the school principal and PTA to obtain training for a teacher willing to become a Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT)—a highly trained dyslexia specialist. Within 3 years, 60 children were receiving academic language therapy in that school.  

“At that point,” Elenz says, “word got out around the city. Parents or teachers or principals would start calling me to see how I did it. And I would help each school do it. I probably worked on four different school programs before I realized that this is all great, but it needs to happen faster. We had 130 schools in our district at the time and probably 80-83 elementary schools. Everybody deserved that,” she says. 

Elenz ran for office and was elected to the district’s Board of Trustees. She began working with Dr. Robillard, who had already transformed the district’s 504 processes and educated many school psychologists in the neuroscience of identifying and intervening with dyslexia.  

Together, they secured support from superintendents and district officials, arranged training for educators, implemented district-wide dyslexia screening in kindergarten, expanded evidence-based interventions, and provided parents with a wealth of resources.  

Here are 6 strategies they used along the way. 

1. Build awareness of dyslexia and how to address it.  

For many schools, the first barrier to a schoolwide dyslexia program is a lack of understanding about the nature and characteristics of dyslexia. Misconceptions exist everywhere, from administrators to school board officials to classroom teachers.  

“The first thing you need is a common understanding of what dyslexia is and what it is not—it’s not just mixing up your numbers and letters, which is what 90% of people think. Once you have that common understanding, people are willing to work with you,” Elenz says. 

Elenz and Dr. Robillard focused first on the people who could make decisions about programs and funding: school board members. “I did training for the board on what dyslexia is, and what the biological underpinnings are, and what you need to do to identify and treat it,” Dr. Robillard says. “I ended up having to go back several times to field questions from them about where the money was going and why it was going there.”  

It was also important to ensure that superintendents, special education directors, and school administrators understood dyslexia’s impacts, because school officials are sensitive to the ever-increasing demands placed on schools and educators. They may also be reluctant to change established roles, methods, or processes.  

“Schools are, as always, pulled to the four corners,” Dr. Robillard says. “You have to start with getting your administrative team on track to understand what this is because the research tells us that where go-eth your principal, go-eth you. If you have an administrative team that understands this is an issue and correcting it is do-able, you’re going to set the tone for the rest of the school to get on board with it,” she explains. 

Elenz agrees. When board members, district administrators, and educators are aligned, change happens. “People then prioritize teacher time,” she says. “They prioritize hiring. They prioritize resources and budgeting. Everything happens from that level of understanding.” 

2. Train teachers in pre-K through 2nd grade to recognize common signs of dyslexia.  

Classroom teachers—especially those in preschool, first, and second grades—are well positioned to notice the early indications of dyslexia. Training them to recognize its characteristics is vital.

“Can this four-year-old rhyme?” Dr. Robillard asks. “They don’t need to know the letters, but do they hear the sound at the beginning of the word? There are very specific dyslexia symptoms we can teach teachers to cue into, so they’re saying, ‘I’ve got to keep an eye on this one or that one.’”

Beyond the early years, it’s important for all teachers understand dyslexia’s nature and indicators so that if a child slips through the cracks in the early years, they can still be identified later. 

3. Screening and assessment are key. Start early and train your team to administer and interpret effective dyslexia assessments.  

Texas has required dyslexia screening for decades, but it often took place in third grade, after reading instruction had taken place. Dr. Robillard, Elenz, and other educators advocated for earlier screening. 

“When the law changed, the requirement to identify kids moved into a kindergarten or first grade space,” Elenz says. “Every kindergarten teacher had to do some kind of quick assessment with their students by the end of kindergarten or first grade. Then you had a baseline for a group of kids you would take through full testing if they continued to have difficulties.” 

It was necessary to train school psychologists and other professionals to conduct comprehensive evaluations using tools designed to identify dyslexia. “We started putting together a battery of tests that would actually look at all the characteristics of dyslexia and do a pretty quick and dirty diagnosis,” Dr. Robillard says. “Most of my people got the testing battery down to around an hour and fifteen minutes, which was crucial because we were, clearly, way behind on identification.”

4. Invest in evidence-based instruction and intervention.   

One of the challenges Austin ISD faced was that, even when dyslexia was accurately identified, few students received effective interventions.

“We knew that academic language therapy worked,” Dr. Robillard says. But few reading specialists and special educators were trained to provide that therapy. To close the gap, the district entered a partnership with Scottish Rite Hospital in Austin, a leader in creating materials and training aligned with Take Flight, an intense intervention for students with dyslexia.  Dr. Robillard explains, “We reached an agreement that they would come in-house and train the people who wanted to become CALTs. That’s where Amber came in. She convinced the Board to make the first-year commitment.”

The process was slow, since only 10 educators could begin training each semester, and the full CALT training process takes two years to complete. Still, at the peak of their partnership, the number of dyslexia specialists in the Austin ISD grew from 3 to 81.

At the same time, the district collaborated with Rawson Saunders Institute to discount training for teachers in another evidence-based program, Basic Language Skills. And they invested in an early reading intervention program, Really Great Reading, so teachers in pre-K through second grade could receive training and materials that supported early reading instruction grounded in the science of reading.

“Helping individual schools have a very strong phonics and phonemic awareness part of their reading program, starting in pre-K, would be ideal,” Dr. Robillard notes. Such programs help reveal early signs of dyslexia. “It also offers those kids some early intervention so that even if they have dyslexia that’s moderate to severe, it’s going to arborize those neurons and build those neural pathways.” Should children need dyslexia intervention later, the groundwork would already be laid.

5. Recruit your strongest allies: parents and caregivers.   

Transforming systems takes motivated leaders. “Because of the competing agendas, beliefs, and priorities in the school district, you have to have a champion who is going to convince others that this is the number one priority,” Elenz says. She and Dr. Robillard found that parents could be some of their staunchest allies.

Dr. Robillard visited schools, listening to parents’ concerns and bolstering their ability to advocate for their kids. Some parents worried about the stigma of a dyslexia diagnosis. Some worried that if dyslexia became the top priority, other disabilities and needs might be overshadowed. And some stepped into leadership roles.

“Once we got parents connected at a school,” Robillard says, “we got them to lead support groups, and they took it from there…Those parent groups then showed up when things were not going as I would have liked with the Board or with a particular district, and they were very helpful in being persuasive.” 

6. Collect the data and tell your story.   

To make a compelling case for schoolwide dyslexia intervention, you will need reliable data. 

“Data collection is really key to moving the conversation and the work forward,” Elenz says. “Otherwise, it’s all theoretical. We need people to collect the data on how many kids are struggling—we know that around 40% of kids in Texas aren’t reading at grade level—and within that 40%, there could be a lot of different reasons for the difficulties.” 

Once you have the numbers in hand, it’s important to tell the story in simple, straightforward language.  

“I’ve done a lot of work in this space,” Elenz says. “I think I was able to be a little more successful because I talk ‘ParentSpeak.’ Parents, teachers, and even board members may get a little lost in the medical and educational jargon that we tend to use.” 

One other tactic Elenz found effective was showing people pictures of what happens in the brain when someone reads, and what that process looks like when someone is struggling to read. “That was game-changing in our conversations,” she says. “Take those pictures with you everywhere you go when you’re trying to explain this to people.” 

Key Messages  

In every classroom, rural and urban, public and private, there are students struggling to read. For some, like Amber Elenz’s son, dyslexia is the reason. It’s possible to create a schoolwide program that makes a genuine difference for children with dyslexia—but it takes time and a considerable investment in resources.  

“I know from experience that when teachers, schools, and districts properly address dyslexia, student outcomes in reading improve, as do their outcomes in all other subject matters, as well as discipline issues and mental health, just to name a few. Investing in one very specific set of actions, you will see positive returns in a multitude of measurable areas around student, school and district success,” 
Elenz says. 

It starts with a common understanding of dyslexia, its characteristics and effects. It involves regularly screening every child, starting in kindergarten, and providing all students with evidence-based instruction. Well-trained educators can learn to spot the signs of dyslexia, multidisciplinary teams can use comprehensive dyslexia assessments to identify the condition, and dyslexia specialists can provide therapy.  

Transforming a school’s or a district’s approach to dyslexia is a weighty and worthwhile endeavor.  “We know the kids are struggling to read,” Elenz concludes. “We know what works. Let’s fix it.” 

Related links from WPS:

• Read more about the specialized expertise of CALTs. 
• Dive into our Dyselxia Assessment Resources. 
• Ready to take action? Shop the Tests of Dyslexia (TOD®).