Outreach program equips Baltimore City schools to help dyslexic students

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Barry L. Gogel clearly remembers the moment in October 2007 when he decided to do what he could to help dyslexic children in Baltimore City’s public schools.

Gogel was at a parental leadership meeting at the Jemicy School, in Owings Mills. which specializes in teaching children with dyslexia and related learning differences. He was watching a presentation by a public school special education teacher that outlined how Jemicy’s reading outreach program had helped her school’s dyslexic students.

The presentation included a video, in which some of the students said they thought they were stupid when they were placed in special ed. When they found out that they just learned differently than the other kids, it changed their self-image.

“My eyes were welling up during this,” Gogel said. “Because I realized if I was in Baltimore City and I didn’t have the wherewithal to send my daughter to Jemicy, she’d be in special ed.”

With his daughter, Mia, as his inspiration, Gogel used his contacts in City Hall to help spread a Jemicy outreach program that trained more than 200 public school teachers in Baltimore this summer to identify and reach dyslexic students.

Before Gogel got involved, Jemicy had a much more limited outreach program. Jemicy teachers were sent to help out at five Baltimore schools that were failing to make the reading grade on their annual yearly progress exams administered by the state. They were essentially teacher’s aides — mentoring the teachers and helping students read one-on-one.

With Jemicy’s help, four out of the five schools made their state benchmarks. Then funding for the outreach program — paid by grants — started to dry up in 2007.

That was when Gogel saw the presentation and envisioned hundreds of dyslexic kids like his daughter lumped into the special ed category in the city. After the meeting, he called his friend Andrew B. Frank, who was deputy mayor of Baltimore at the time.

Frank arranged a meeting with Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Andres Alonso at the Law Office of Arnold M. Weiner, where Gogel works. Gogel said he was just “throwing a pebble in a pond and seeing if a ripple came up,” but Jemicy’s director of outreach and student evaluations, Cathy Rommel, said he’s being modest and that his connections started a dialogue between Jemicy and the Alonso administration, which had been in place for just three months.

Alonso was Baltimore’s sixth superintendent in six years. He was taking over a school system in disarray and his list of priorities was long. But, Gogel said a seed was planted.

Last year, a member of Alonso’s staff contacted Jemicy about starting the Literacy Academy One program.

Instead of the Jemicy teachers going to a few public schools, hundreds of public school teachers would come to them for 15-hour training workshops on Jemicy’s unique, multi-sensory approach to teaching reading. The theory is that different kids learn in different ways, and so, while Jemicy teachers use the visual and auditory components of teaching like traditional teachers, they also try to incorporate touch, movement and taste as well.

“Everything that we do revolves around teaching to the senses,” Rommel said. “Remediating weaknesses while working with the strengths of each child.”

Gogel said some of the methods that worked with Mia included giving her a plate with sugar for texture, or having her dance while learning to read.

The methods have quickly caught on with the teachers who were trained through the Literacy Academy, according to Charlene Iannone-Campbell, the public schools’ director of early learning. Some of those teachers are now training others within the school district, running their own Literacy Academy One sessions.

“We’re really moving more toward rigorous professional development in Baltimore City schools under Dr. Alonso,” Iannone-Campbell said. “So we wanted to continue to do our partnership with Jemicy. … We’re very proud of that partnership.”

For Rommel, seeing her school’s methods reach so many other dyslexic students is beyond rewarding.

“It’s what I live for,” she said. “When you go out and you train other teachers and see the ‘aha’ moments that they have… it’s totally what I live for.”

Gogel has stayed involved at Jemicy, volunteering with the school’s fundraising auction that drew 400 people and raised about $146,000 in April. He’s been a member of Jemicy’s outreach board for four years.

For Gogel, who taught algebra at Western High School in the early 1990s, outreach is about sharing with other families the joy he felt as he watched his own daughter thrive in school.

Mia is now in “Y Group,” which equates roughly to eighth or ninth grade in a Jemicy system that doesn’t allow students the possible blow to their self-esteem that can come with being held back and stuck to a lower number than others their age.

“They give you a positive way to learn,” Mia said of Jemicy. “Like, ‘Oh, good job, you did this.’ It’s a very positive way [of teaching] and a very interactive way. You’re not just sitting down with them talking to you.”

Mia also said she likes that her dad and her mom, WBAL reporter/anchor Deborah Weiner, are very involved at Jemicy. But Gogel seemed to dispute that just a bit.

“She’s lying — she hates it when I’m there,” he said with a laugh. “There’s nobody who can embarrass Mia like I can, but that’s my role as a dad.”