Give to the Max Day & End of the Year 2022

Living out his childhood fantasy, Reading Center alumnus and recent Arizona State graduate Tim Jirik is living in Cape Canaveral, Florida building reusable space rockets for the aerospace company, Blue Origin. For Tim, being able to touch and see rockets on a daily basis is a dream come true! Being dyslexic, the journey to this dream job was not always easy. 

Tim recalls in the 1st grade, when each week he would read to a 5th grade reading buddy. To cover up his struggles in reading, Tim hid a book that he had memorized to reuse each week. Into secondary school, he remembers feeling stupid when he was pulled out of class for extra help and was hesitant to accept any accommodations.

As Tim grew up, he learned to recognize having dyslexia isn’t a bad thing. Instead it is something that makes him unique. He credits his Reading Center tutor, Robin Sullivan for laying the building blocks of language and building his confidence, empowering him to accomplish things that his younger self would never have thought possible.

Over the past 71 years, Reading Center tutors have used the science of reading to teach over 15,000 dyslexic students. Like Tim, these students are able to blast off and reach their full potential with our proven interventions.

According to the NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, average reading scores from 2020 to 2022 for age 9 students saw the largest score drop since 1990 – and they were not good to start with. Disruptions in education due to COVID have been hard on families. Luckily, The Reading Center is here to help struggling readers, whether in person or online. The demand for our services and need-based scholarships have never been higher. In 2021 we awarded $101,403 in scholarship dollars to students and trainees- an increase of 76% over 2019. Thanks to generous donors like you, we were able to keep families who were struggling during the pandemic in our tutoring program as well as offer scholarships to new students.  

This year, we are providing robust scholarship help as well as barrier-free tutoring for the lowest income students through our partnerships. Our partners include Jeremiah Program, Gage Elementary and the Reading Champions programs in Rochester and Urban Ventures and College Prep Elementary in the Twin Cities, to provide free tutoring on-site to underserved populations of struggling readers. We need your support to maintain this level of scholarship funding and community outreach.  

 Will you donate in 2021 to help The Reading Center meet the needs of greater numbers of dyslexic students?

 $50…..can pay for a child to receive a scholarship for one week of tutoring so the child may reach his or her potential 

$100…..can buy supplies for one whole classroom of students with reading differences during Best of Basics Summer School so they may begin their school year with more skills in the fall 

$250…..can provide a partial scholarship for a child to be tested at The Reading Center in order to put the child on a path to success 

$500…..can pay for a partial training scholarship for an adult taking our Orton-Gillingham Training Institute to learn the skills to teach dyslexic students

In our 71st year, The Reading Center continues our upward trajectory of serving more young people and training more adults in the Orton-Gillingham approach. We also continue to provide guidance over the phone and supply worried parents answers about their child’s reading struggles. Through our classes and our extremely effective Orton-Gillingham tutoring, we work with students of all ages to gain the skills needed to be good readers. 

Like us, you know how critical it is that children with dyslexia become confident readers. With your support, children who would have struggled and experienced only failures are learning to read!