Personalized 1-to-1 Tutoring Offered in East Hampton, New York

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, a perfect time to spotlight evidence-based instruction and expand access for students who need explicit, multi-sensory, systematic support that focuses on phonemic awarenness, phonics, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Dyslexia, a neurological, inherited condition caused by a different wiring of the brain, has no relationsip to intelligence, but rather a condition where reading and writing become difficult to learn. It's important to emphasize that illiteracy isn't about ignorant, lazy children, but rather about teachers using flawed reading methodologies that don't work.

In Newsday's editorial dated Thursday, September 25, 2025, members of the editorial board addressed the idea that our schools need to get back to teaching basics in order to boost reading. The editorial opened with the following: "Kids' reading scores across the country and in New York remain chronically and stubbornly low. A recent national report shows high school seniors are reading at lower levels than at any time since at least 1992. A little more than half of New York students in grades 3-8 aren't reading proficiently. These reading proficiency rates are disturbing and should be a major concern to all. We have to get this right. A kid in a Long Island school who can't read is unconscionable."

In September 2022, The East Hampton Star reported that “pandemic-era learning setbacks had hobbled reading and math progress” both nationally and locally. Unfortunately, the most recent reading test results in the East Hampton School District, school year 2024-2025, have not accomplished the district’s focus on returning to academic excellence with 52% of their elementary students unable to meet or exceed the reading proficiency level and 41% of their middle school students unable to meet or exceed the reading proficiency level. As a lifelong learner and educator, I believe that reading and writing are necessary skills for living a productive life with dignity and respect because reading is a superpower that represents freedom to achieve your greatest potential and live a life you’re meant to live.

Our public schools need to focus on raising confident readers who learn to love reading. In American Educator, a journal of educational equity, research, and ideas, the editors noted that “there is a reciprocal relationship between reading and writing. Both decoding (sounding words out) and encoding (spelling words) rely on the same foundational knowledge,” yet the teaching of writing in relationship to reading has been eliminated in most public-school settings. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education revealed that 20% of all public-school populations struggle with reading. That’s 1 in 5 kids that can’t read on grade level or can’t read at all. That is both statistically significant and an educational crime.

If you find your child falls in that group of students who are academically failing due to an inability to read on grade level, and who are not receiving structured literacy classes five days a week, perhaps it’s time to consider a successful alternative here in the village of East Hampton: Personalized one-to-one structured literacy tutoring by Helene Forst, a certified, Harvard educated reading specialist, who can offer reading and writing instruction grounded in the Science of Reading that is proven to work with students with reading challenges.