The Yale Center for Dyslexia reports about one in five Americans have dyslexia, the neurological-based condition that can mean difficulties with reading comprehension. Using that statistic as a yardstick, that means there are many children in Arkansas with dyslexia.
"That’s 95,000 children."
Patricia Elkins is the incoming national president of the Academic Language Therapy Association. She’s also a dyslexia therapist and works at Little Rock Christian Academy.
She said most children with dyslexia in Arkansas are served in special education classes.
“However, oftentimes, more often than not, those individuals have not had that high level of training needed to be able to help these children learn to read and learn to spell. And these are the children who most need the most highly trained person to provide those services,” Elkins said.
Yesterday, a new partnership was officially formed. It’s designed to create more qualified instructors to teach children with dyslexia. They’re called Certified Academic Language Therapists, or CALTs.
The Nelms Dyslexia Center in Fayetteville hosted yesterday’s formal signing of a memorandum of understanding between the center, the University of Arkansas, and the Academic Language Therapy Association. They’ll work together to make it more affordable for people to become Certified Academic Language Therapists.
The Arkansas Department of Education reports there are about 176 credentialed language therapists in the state. The Nelms Dyslexia Center estimates Arkansas needs at least one CALT in each school to sufficiently meet the needs of all students with dyslexia. That’s about 1,500 CALTs.
The pathway to becoming a CALT includes at least a couple of years of training. Requirements include 200 hours of instruction from a qualified instructor and 700 hours of supervised practicum.
"where you consult back and forth with your qualified instructor, and your instructor observes you, and you have to have 10 successful observations. Because it’s a real mentoring relationship between the instructor and the trainee to help them develop the techniques to help these children who struggle with dyslexia,” Elkins said.
CALT nominees also sit for a national licensing exam and must possess a master’s degree.
That’s where the partnership with the University of Arkansas’s College of Education and Health Professions comes in. The college’s dean, Kate Mamiseishvili, says the partnership will allow for training at the Nelms Center to coincide with earning a master’s at the U of A.
“Individuals who are doing their certification or training to be Certified Academic Language Therapists, they can simultaneously earn a master’s degree in special education. But what’s special about it, they can get six credit hours of prior learning, which is the first time it happened at the graduate level at the University of Arkansas. What that means is that credit is just awarded without paying, without enrolling. So it makes the program affordable, and it also fast-tracks earning their master’s degree,” Mamiseishvili said.
The dean says students can also earn another six credit hours based on experiential learning they’re already doing for class certification at the Nelms Center.
She said this unique cooperation between the three entities required some innovative thinking and a bit of inspiration from Winnie the Pooh, who once said, You can’t stay in your corner of the forest —
"Waiting for others to come to you. Sometimes you have to go to them," Mamiseishvili said. “So this is exactly what we did. We did not stay in our corner of the forest. We went to each other, and that’s how it all started. We started talking. There were several months of meetings and really learning from each other. A lot of respecting and trusting each other’s expertise.”
The Nelms Center was founded by Don and Millie Nelms. Don Nelms, a prominent businessman and philanthropist in northwest Arkansas who has dyslexia, said the new partnership can mean better help for others with dyslexia.
He said people like him who have dyslexia and, as he puts it, have “done okay in life,” have strengths.
"That otherwise we might not have had. We don’t know that. There’s no way of knowing. But I feel like in my life I have had those strengths. I’ve had the ability to organize. I’ve had the ability to understand and have empathy with other people and to try to create a situation that would work. I mean, I’m a person that I’m a problem solver, and I take pride in that because there are so many things I’m not good at. But I think that’s one of the things I am.
“I think that is the kind of thing that with the University of Arkansas we can propagate many, many more people. I’d like to touch thousands of people instead of tens of people, and I think eventually we will,” Nelms said.
University of Arkansas Chancellor Charles Robinson says the partnership with the Nelms Dyslexia Center is completely supported by the university.
“Because this falls squarely in our mission as a land-grant institution. That land grant means that we serve the state of Arkansas and we serve it wherever it needs service. And with regards to supporting K through 12 and developing the workforce that is necessary to serve these students who need this support and deserve this support, the University of Arkansas is 100 percent with you, Don, in doing that,” Robinson said.
If you’d like to hear more specifically about the creation of the Nelms Dyslexia Center and what happens there, you can find the report prepared by Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis that aired on our program earlier this summer.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
