BATAVIA, Ohio — Cassie Carter has been a teacher in Clermont County for over 10 years, but this school year is the first time she’s not in a traditional classroom.
“Reading is just a puzzle, the kids are just missing all these pieces to the puzzle,” Carter said.
In the summer of 2023, Carter began tutoring students to make some extra cash and help them build their literacy skills. By the end of the summer, she had 40 students. Carter continued her tutoring into the school year and by the end of it, she was helping more than 80 students.
As she continued to see students in her classroom struggling, Carter created Letters 2 Literacy, a nonprofit that focuses on literacy and phonics.
“Day 1 as a first grade teacher we got into the classroom and we’re like, ‘We’re teaching all this information but our students aren’t like, they’re not mastering it. They’re not learning it to be able to apply it,’” Carter said.
Carter and her team of 9 other teachers, a speech pathologist and occupational therapists serve more than 100 students across 19 different school districts in the Tri-State.
According to Ohio's 2022-2023 Literacy Report, the most frequently reported "explicit interventions" across grades K-4 were in decoding.
That's why Carter and her team use the Orton-Gillingham approach, a multi-sensory phonics technique for reading instruction. According to the Orton-Gillingham website, the evidence-based approach focuses on teaching students the connection between phonemes and graphemes through the use of auditory, visual, and kinesthetic pathways.
"What we do is phonics based," said Carter. "We hit the foundational skills to fill in the learning gaps so that students can get to the reading to learn phase."
She added that this method changes lives.
“30-minute one-on-one with our kids can change their whole lives,” Carter said. “I feel like 100% it is the solution.”
And that feeling is mutual for parent Lisa Fox and her son, Levi, who she brought to Letters 2 Literacy after another program wasn’t working for him.
“He’s a cancer survivor so we knew there were going to be some delays, but I thought that maybe reading was just not going to happen for him,” Fox said.
Fox said when Levi first came to Letters 2 Literacy he struggled with single-letter words, but now it’s a different story.
“The progress that he’s made has been life-changing,” Fox said. “He is now reading two-syllable words, writing, he's sounding words out.”
Fox recalled when her son used to carry around a book and pretend to read because he wanted that for himself. Now, she said he enjoys reading.
Carter said Levi isn’t their only success story, and gives much of the credit to the Orton-Gillingham approach.
Letters 2 Literacy also offers free lessons to families who struggle financially, so that nothing gets in the way of their children succeeding.
For more information on Letters 2 Literacy, you can visit their website here.
