To families considering Julia Wilcox’s services,

Julia has been working with our son for over two years, shortly after he was diagnosed with a reading disorder. We started when he was in fourth grade, and he’s finishing sixth grade now. While we found a number of different reading “systems” out there, our research led us to the conclusion that Orton-Gillingham (OG) methods were the most credible and were actually scientifically demonstrated to help the student. We were thrilled that Julia was deeply experienced with helping kids through O-G. The first, really positive sign was when she clearly stated her preference for in-person sessions (most other reading specialists were doing everything over zoom, and this was well after the pandemic). We still use zoom with Julia when it helps with tight schedules, but the value of the live, first-person experience with her students is deeply important to her. Yes, she deals with the sometimes terrible traffic, because it means she can better connect with her students. Second, she quickly connected with our son. We saw her take her time to get to know him and then figure out what he needed. She knows that adults can turn off some kids with the adult’s stronger personalities or strict approaches. She absolutely considers what the individual student needs first to really succeed. I’d say it took a couple weeks (maybe a month or more tops), but she figured out how to engage our son in a way that brought out the best in him during his sessions. I want to emphasize that this is an even harder task when our son is giving up hours of “free time” to do extra “school”). Third, we’ve been able to establish a great level of communication and respectful flexibility with her. If there’s a schedule issue to address, we raise it and work together to figure out the best outcome. But this is a two way street. We try to extend to Julia the same amount of reasonable flexibility and understanding that she offers our family. In this way, and many others, we have a partnership to best support our son’s development. Most important, though, is that Julia delivers. We knew that this was a multi-year journey to help our son better prepare for middle school and high school. Even after a year, we saw a dramatic difference in our son’s fluency and comfort level reading. During each lesson, Julia tracks issues that come up (words misspelled, words misunderstood, lessons/patterns not fully mastered) and makes sure to come back to them in future lessons. It’s deeply comforting to know that Julia is so actively managing our son’s learning plan. She is absolutely willing to work with reading specialists in the schools (but our elementary school reading specialist wasn’t proactive to make this happen). We do expect that Julia will be able to coordinate a bit more with our middle school reading specialist (fingers-crossed). If your child has an IEP, I highly recommend sharing it and any related testing with her (especially over time). She has always been eager to incorporate any additional data/insights that might help her own learning plan for our son. In short, Julia has been amazing, and we are deeply thankful to have found her. She has drastically improved our son’s academic trajectory, and it’s a pleasure to work with her and see her every week. I am happy to answer questions you may have. Just email or text me.

Sincerely,

Chris Hagner