Vol. 38, No. 18

11-19-2008
By: Jamila Williams

OSU Reading Clinic lifts spirits and minds

When Janine Harris thinks of the progress her fourth-grade daughter Chloe has made in the last four weeks, it brings tears to her eyes.

After years of struggling to help Chloe with her spelling and writing comprehension, Harris finally decided to seek help and turned to the OSU Reading Clinic.

An initiative in the School of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology, the clinic has a twofold mission: To provide clinical experience for undergraduate and graduate students and to help improve the literacy rate in the Columbus community.

The Reading Clinic, run by Program Manager Dorothy Morrison, serves between 65-70 students ranging from pre-K to young adults every week. For $20 an hour, students from all over the Columbus area find assistance with reading, writing and — just added recently — math skills.

Students who qualify for free and reduced lunch in the school system pay half price. For a struggling parent not knowing what to do, it’s a small fee to pay to boost a child’s confidence and willingness to work hard.

Harris, a Clintonville resident, had been home-schooling 9-year-old Chloe when she became concerned by her continued problems with spelling.

“She couldn’t spell anything,” Harris said.

After looking at some private schools and other programs, Harris decided to call the Reading Clinic. An assessment determined Chloe lacked the connections most students form for phonetic spelling and the staff devised an individualized program similar to those used to help deaf children.

There has been dramatic improvement. During her first assessment, Chloe was presented with 20 words to spell and got them all wrong. Just recently, she was given 15 of the same words and got 13 of them right, Harris said.

“It has changed her life,” Harris said. “She’s writing, she’s confident again and we didn’t think anything would work. She’s just so happy.”

Beaming, Harris insisted that Morrison “had to be angel” because of all the wonderful things that the Reading Clinic has done for Chloe and other kids like her.

“The first thing she told Chloe was, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’” Harris said.

Morrison lights up when she speaks of the children the clinic assists.

“I love the growth I see in the children and the problem-solving that goes into it,” Morrison said. “Each child learns in a slightly different way and responds to slightly different strategies.”

Morrison deflects the praise she receives onto her staff for the dedication they all show.

Heidi Beauregard, a grad student and tutor, has been working there three nights a week since the beginning of the quarter. Much of Beauregard’s job is to supervise the students enrolled in Teaching and Learning classes to earn their Reading Endorsements, but she also helps brainstorm news ways to attract more adults to the clinic for help.

“With no adults here this quarter, I’m exploring new ways to open up services to adult learning in the community,” Beauregard said. “Most other adult education programs are free services, so it’s difficult to market the Reading Clinic’s services.”

Post-graduate student Rod Drewry has been assisting a junior in high school who’s brilliant when it comes to math and science but just can’t seem to get his sentences to flow properly.

“He understands what he wants to talk about, but he doesn’t know how to talk about it,” Drewry said.

For three nights a week for about an hour, the two go over sentence structures and how words relate to a sentence, partly in preparation for standardized testing like the SAT.

Much of the one-on-one, hands-on approach the Reading Clinic takes is what keeps students coming back. Every student who comes to the clinic is individually assessed in reading, writing and, if necessary, math. The student is then presented with a comprehensive, well-planned program that best suits his or her needs.

“We don’t try to fit a child into a preconceived mold,” Morrison said.

Teachers from throughout the community also have taken independent studies to further learn the methods of the Reading Clinic and implement them in their own classrooms with their own students, Morrison said. “One teacher repeated the course for a total of three times,” Morrison said.

Harris loves the one-on-one attention her daughter receives and wishes more parents knew about the opportunities the clinic offers.

“I’m telling everyone I know,” Harris said. “I wish it was well-known because there are so many kids out there that could be helped.”

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