As classes get underway this month for the 2022-23 academic year, some students are facing steep challenges due to dyslexia and other learning disorders. Parents will be seeking solutions.
In fact, so great is the demand for help that a Ponte Vedra Beach clinic, having opened its doors just one year ago, has already more than quadrupled the size of its staff.
The Morris Center, located at 50 Executive Way, a neurodevelopmental treatment and assessment clinic, offers prevention and remediation services to meet the specific needs of each client.
Within the center are three businesses: a health care clinic that addresses neurodevelopmental disorders, a category that includes dyslexia, language disorders, ADHD, sensory processing disorders and autism; a school where educators help students “close the gap” between their IQ and their current level of academic skills; and an afterschool tutoring program, which relies on small-group instruction and is the most affordable of the clinic’s services, at $40 per hour.
The health care team of speech pathology, occupational therapy and psychology each play an important role in the assessment and treatment process and work with instructors at the center.
The comprehensive array of services is the creation of neuropsychologist Tim Conway Ph.D., president of The Morris Center clinics. Conway is a UF professor with an extensive background in research and demonstrable results.
The center’s school is patterned after another of Conway’s successes, The Einstein School in Gainesville. Built in 1999, it is the first charter school in the nation for children with dyslexia.
The approach of The Morris Center Academy school is evidence-based, using a program the company developed after decades of research and testing. It is meant to be a temporary school, where students would receive remedial courses in addition to regular curriculum for a year or two.
“Our goal is: Close the gap from a remedial instructional model, get these skills up to their IQ level … and then transition them back to whatever school environment the family and the student feel is the right fit for them,” said Conway. With newly improved academic skills, they choose the school they want, not the school that might accept them with poor academic skills.
In some cases, the child’s struggles to read, write or spell may not be related to a disorder at all, but rather to poor instruction at a former school. Despite new stories from the UK, all people with dyslexia do not genetically have “strengths” that fully literate people do not have — that is a misguided myth.
Florida Standards Assessment figures for spring 2022 offer a grim picture of English language arts proficiency in the Sunshine State. Only an average of 29% of students taking the assessments in grades three through six demonstrated proficiency. Likewise, National Assessment of Educational Progress outcomes report that only 25% of Florida’s third graders are proficient readers, a consistent outcome that has occurred annually for more than 30 years, not due to COVID.
Neither outcome can be attributed solely to dyslexia, which affects between 5% and 20% of students.
Students struggling to keep up, regardless of the cause, can be helped by The Morris Center. And that is largely due to its reliance on health care brain scientists using approaches that are research-based or evidence-based.
In a study published in 1999, Conway and his team compared the progress of four groups of 5-year-olds who had performed poorly on phonological skills (the number one predictor of reading skills), each group then receiving a different type of intervention. Three of the groups — including one that relied on a standard phonics program — demonstrated unimpressive to poor results. Between 25% and 41% of students in those groups did not pass kindergarten or first grade.
However, 91% of the group that used a methodology that worked first on speech processing skills and later on letters, decoding, reading and comprehension passed kindergarten and first grade — Conway’s intervention program.
In a follow-up study, those students were brought back at the end of the fourth grade to see how they had fared on their own without additional treatment. The result: their reading accuracy and speed had increased without additional remedial services or special education placements.
Clearly, setting the neurological and speech processing foundation for successful literacy made all the difference.
And such success can be life-changing.
“When you change a child’s literacy, you don’t just change their reading skills,” said Conway. “You change their whole self-esteem. You change their self-confidence, and it impacts the child and family for generations!”
In 2013, Conway launched his online instruction service, Neuro-Development of Words — NOW! It is accessible from anywhere and offers 1:1 or small group instruction to children, teens and adults. People around the globe are using the service with strong outcomes, too.
“We are the world’s only global provider of literacy services that are evidence-based from 15 years of NICHD-funded randomized controlled trials research,” said Conway.
Conway joined The Morris Center in 1989 and bought the company in 2008, opening a clinic in Ocala in 2011. In 2016, he opened a Caribbean clinic in Trinidad and Tobago. In 2020, he partnered with a nonprofit, Alabama Game Changers, to launch a 16,000-square-foot clinic in Birmingham with a staff of 50.
The Ponte Vedra clinic opened in 2021. But Conway is far from finished.
“We’re opening clinics across the country and internationally,” he said, adding that, because of the growth, he is “hiring every day.”
To learn more, go to TheMorrisCenterPVB.com. To learn about the NOW! Programs, go to NOWPrograms.net.
