Reading Impairment - Treatments for Dyslexia and Related Disorders

Can I find good dyslexia treatment in schools?
Maybe.  The fact is, teachers--both those in general education and special education--receive varying degrees of training to diagnose and treat reading disorders.  They may have a significant amount or very little.  Wrightslaw, the special education law website, discusses this fact in a 2009 blog post here.  This can greatly impact what, if any, interventions your child receives.  Nancy Bailey's 2015 blog post describes the push away from intensive interventions and into general inclusion for all special education students.  This is nominally a good thing, perhaps intended to decrease stigma and increase access to grade-level content.  However, there is increasing evidence that students with profound reading disorders require intense, frequent, and individualized treatment in order to achieve grade-level proficiency. 

What special knowledge of dyslexia does an SLP have?
Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability, and its precursors can include deficits in oral language as well as difficulties picking out speech sounds in words (Catts, 1997; Bruck, 1992).  Speech Language Patholgists know two things very well: oral language and speech sounds.  These form the basis of early reading skills: phonological awareness and word retrieval.  For children with a history of speech sound impairment (for example, a child who continues to swap his "k" for "t" past a certain time), this is even more important expertise as these children are at greater risk for reading disorders.

Why is multi-modal learning important?
Colorado Communication Therapy works with students using evidence-based practices that emphasize mapping the movement of speech articulators (your lips, tongue, teeth and throat) to sounds and symbols.  Students are taught to rewire their thinking to create new associations in order to recognize letter order, letter pairs, as well as to learn common spelling patterns and symbol imagery for words that do not "play fair" in English.  It's intense, systematic, and individualized for your child's needs.