Local News - July 2003

Charter School eyes non-traditional program

Published July 7, 2003

Remedial readers targeted

By JEREMY ASHTON, LTN Staff Writer

Shay Potter stood in front of a group of teachers at the Lincoln Charter School last week and made what seemed like a simple statement.

“It shouldn’t take a child six years to learn how to read,” she said.

The point Potter was trying to make is that teaching a child to read doesn’t have to be a difficult process. And she was there to show them how it could be done easily.

Potter, a special education and English teacher at a high school in Sterling, Va., was at the charter school to introduce teachers to a new reading program called Phono-Graphix.

Principal Bill Elmore originally planned to use the program just to help students in kindergarten through second grade who are struggling with reading. After listening to Potter, Elmore may have teachers incorporate Phono-Graphix into regular instruction to reach a lofty goal.

“We want to pass no non-readers to third grade next year,” he said.

Phono-Graphix was developed by Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness and outlined in their book “Reading Reflex.” Originally intended for parents, it has been adopted by teachers like Potter in the five years since it was first published.

Based on independent research, Potter said, Phono-Graphix has been recommended for beginning and remedial readers alike.

In creating the program, the McGuinnesses looked at brain research, linguistics, maturation of children — “all those different areas of the sciences that go into making a kid,” Potter said. The result is a reading program with methods that, in many ways, are directly opposite of its traditional counterparts.

Phono-Graphix teaches the relationships of sounds to symbols rather than symbols to sounds. There are no phonics rules so students don’t have to learn numerous exceptions, and lessons are written in “decodable” text to show how sounds in a word work together.

Basically, all students need to know is how to segment words into their various sounds and blend them back together.

“It teaches the skills just for a child to be able to read, nothing else,” Potter said.

The program is somewhat controversial — experts dispute whether or not the radical approach is as effective as the McGuinnesses claim — but Potter isn’t one to shy away from controversy.

She is unabashedly passionate about the program. After all, she’s seen high school students go from limited reading skills to studying the works of Edgar Allen Poe within three weeks.

But her enthusiasm about the program comes from a far more personal source.

At 7, her daughter Jacquin was diagnosed with dyslexia, a neurological learning disability that can make word recognition difficult. Potter, then a physical education teacher, shifted her focus to special education.

“I had to understand her, and I couldn’t understand her, a very gifted child, why she couldn’t read,” Potter said.

When she was 19, Jacquin Potter could only read on a fourth-grade level. She “retired” from high school as a junior, frustrated because she couldn’t cope.

Shay Potter was desperate for something to help.

In 1997, she stumbled on a book called “Why Our Children Can’t Read” by Diane McGuinness, Geoffrey’s mother. The book contained a reference to the then-unpublished “Reading Reflex.” Potter got her hands on a complimentary copy.

“I knew instinctively that this would work,” she said. “Basically, it had to.”

After just 10 hours with Phono-Graphix and another therapist, Jacquin Potter was able to earn a general equivalency degree. She went to community college for a year before moving to an extension campus of Penn State University and finally Kent State University. She made the dean’s list at both schools and started taking courses she missed in high school.

She’s now studying to be a radiation therapist.

“This is a child that they told me the only thing  that I could expect futuristically because of her lack of cognitive development was maybe working at McDonald’s and being a nurse’s aid,” Shay Potter said. “But I had belief in her, belief in the program and decided that was not going to happen.

“So I owe a lot to this.”

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Staff Writer Jeremy Ashton can be reached at 704-735-3031 or jashton@ltnews.com.

© 2001 Lincoln Times-News  

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