Why I Started a Dyslexia Support Group at Summit Ranch

I was in my Orton-Gillingham training, the certification you earn to teach kids with dyslexia to read. If there was ever going to be a room full of people who understood, it was this one. These were the people who were supposed to know.

I came in worn down. By then I had bought every tool. We traced letters in sprinkles she could eat, in shaving cream, on apps, in games. Flashcards. Bedtime stories every night, then the same stories again because she asked. Tears. I did every single thing you are supposed to do, in a house full of educators. Somewhere in there I had stopped hoping for a fix and started hoping for something smaller and harder to get. Someone who was supposed to know, saying out loud that my kid wasn't lazy or stupid, and neither was I.

Then a teacher in the room, someone there to learn how to teach kids to read, said that a child who doesn't know their letter names by kindergarten couldn't have come from a home with books in it.

That sentence takes a five-year-old who is struggling and turns their struggle into a verdict on their family. It skips right past the possibility that the kid's brain processes written language differently. And it was said in a room full of people training to teach these exact kids.

I sat there waiting for the room to say so.

What happened instead is the part I still think about. The room got careful. The priority in that moment, and I could feel it, was to let this person down easy, to keep her from feeling bad about what she had said. Not to name what the sentence would do to a child it was said about.

That was the second cut, and it went deeper than the first.

I had walked in thinking understanding would be waiting for me here, of all places. I walked out knowing it wasn't coming from the outside at all. Not from the experts, not from the trainings, not from the people who were supposed to know. If I wanted a room that was actually safe, I was going to have to build it.

So, a few years later, I did.

What the group has become

When I started it, this was the room I couldn't find. It's more than that now. There are a few families I've come to hold close, people I've celebrated real victories with and sat in communal disbelief with when a school pulled something none of us could believe. We pass resources back and forth. We laugh at the noise our gremlins make upstairs.

For the parents, it stays practical. We trade the things that help: how to support reading at home, how to make school mornings less awful, how to walk into an IEP meeting knowing what you're allowed to ask for. I went down every rabbit hole after my daughter's diagnosis, the books, the workshops, structured literacy and the stuff that actually has evidence behind it, and also a mountain of bad information I wasted real time on. I don't want you to lose the time I lost.

For the kids, it's often the first time they've been in a room with other kids who read the way they do. At the last meeting I caught a few of them grumbling about the demons that are nonsense words, while they made sodas and dug through resin figures. They stop being the only one. You can watch it happen.

The part nobody warns you about

You are going to end up knowing more about your kid's brain than a lot of the professionals you sit across from. Most of them are doing their best. It's still a lot of weight, and you should not have to carry it in a room by yourself.

Here is the whole difference in our room. When something harmful gets said about a kid, we say so. Out loud. Nobody in this group gets let down gently at a child's expense.

If this sounds like your house

You don't need a diagnosis to come. You don't need to know anything about dyslexia yet. You don't need to have any of it figured out. If your kid struggles with reading and you have questions, you belong in the room.

I built it because I needed it and it didn't exist.

My daughter reads now. Voraciously, expensively, one bookstore haul at a time. I still never tell her no on a book. I made this group for the years between the kid in the sprinkles and the kid who won't put the book down. For every parent still standing in the sprinkles, wondering if it ever changes.

It exists now.

The Summit Ranch dyslexia support group meets monthly and it's free. Parents and kids are both welcome, and the kids have their own activity while the parents meet, so childcare isn't a reason to stay home. Register at summitranch.org/groups.

More from the blog: What nobody tells you about the kid who's "fine at school" and Neurodivergent, not broken.