Danielle Scorrano: Resha Conroy, it is a pleasure to speak with you today. I'm delighted that we could connect that I could learn from you, that our READers could learn from you, especially during dyslexia Awareness Month.
Resha Conroy: Thank you for having me, inviting me to this space to share my experience and to share the work that the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children is doing.
DS: I did some research on your work before our interview together, and I knew that your story and your work was something that needed to be shared with families nationwide. In one of the talks that I watched about you, something you said really struck me and stuck with me. You said, “Equity has to be part of any literacy movement.” Now, I'd like to know a little bit more about your story, you know, you are dedicated to education reform toward achieving equity for all specifically as it relates to literacy. What lens and experience do you approach education reform and equity?
RC: My lens is really informed by my personal experiences, you know, my experience as a black woman, as the mother of two children with language-based disorders, and specifically, my son has dyslexia. It's informed by my career as a professional who began some 20 years ago working with charter schools and really understanding based on both qualitative and quantitative data that public education fails many communities- certainly black and brown communities, individuals with disabilities, and those who have fewer resources, and really experiencing and realizing the barriers to access are consistently present. They’re due to systemic racism. And they're due to this culture of ableism, specifically talking about it in the context of dyslexia. So my lens is both historical, and it also looks at these socially constructed identity, or our identities of race and ability, and these identities in certain communities are marginalized. The inequities are compounded, and this is really how I frame my work around education reform and equity.
DS: Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate you speaking about your experience at charter schools, and you specifically talked about your son. Now we're recording this in the height of summer. We were just talking about our how summer quickly goes by. This episode will air during October Dyslexia Awareness Month, and you are the founder of the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children. Why did you create this organization, and I will ask you about the mission. I'd like to know a little bit more about why you wanted to establish this organization first?
RC: I created the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children because of my family's experience with getting a diagnosis and with getting intervention for my son's dyslexia. Through that journey, I realized that the experience is not unique to me, that there are things that are systemic, and that families need support through these experiences. We also need to begin to embark on changing these systems. Now, the other thing that I really saw was just how our identities shape and can often magnify barriers to accessing a diagnosis or to accessing intervention. To make a very long short story short, my son was attending our local public school, and I was unable to get him a diagnosis there. He had a history of a language delay, he had word finding issues in the classroom, and he wasn't acquiring reading, as you would expect. I requested an evaluation from the school and they did it and they denied services, even though you, on paper, he was presenting like a child who had dyslexia in the classroom. So I had to get an independent evaluation, which, of course, is costly. And even with that independent evaluation, the district was prepared to deny me services again. And the only reason that my son got an IEP, and you know, I won't speak to the to the quality of it, but the only reason he got an IEP was because of a speech and language deficit, not because of his dyslexia. It was ignored in the school, and I got the language that a lot of families get this language around “waiting to fail”, or he's too young, or let's give him more time. And we know that this is false. And we know that it's dangerous because it delays intervention. I also heard language around educator expectations for my son.
This is where intersectionality really starts to come into the picture. I was told things like, well, it's okay that his reading is on the low end of average. And he did really well on a non-reading assessment and I was asked by the school psychologists if I was surprised that he was so smart. At the time I was in a high performing school district, so the expectations for students were generally high. But for whatever reason, they weren't high for my son. For me personally coming from my background in education reform and in charter schools, I knew that this was really seeking to what we know, the research around lower educator expectations for black children. It gives us a glimpse into how when you start to compound the social identities, this increases the barriers to access. And the thing that's interesting about dyslexia is, we have a lot of definitions out there. There's a definition that said it occurs with unexpected difficulties in learning to read, right, so unexpected difficulties in learning to read. Now, if you apply this to a child that's black that is facing lower educator expectations, then will you ever really see this unexpected difficulty? No, because it's, it's expected that the child is going to not perform at the level of their non-black peers. And you know, and we see this in the research, and we see this in schools as well. If a black child attends a school that is majority black, or has really high rates of reading deficiencies, they're less likely to be identified with dyslexia, because no one is saying, “Oh, well, this child can’t read, maybe it's dyslexia. It's okay.” And it's expected that maybe this child is not going to learn to read. This is why we don't have the type of national outcry that we should have when we see the disparities by race when we're looking at reading proficiency.
So I had this idea for the organization based on my experience, but it really wasn't until the summer of 2020, and you know this is in the midst of COVID. We were all experiencing this collective pain around COVID, and around the disparities that we were seeing with healthcare, but we're also experiencing this period of racial reckoning or this brief moment where duality of our lived experiences were on display. And we were seeing it like I said, in healthcare, or receiving an education, and so for me, it was now or never, it was that moment where we do something now. If not now, when?
It became this time to prioritize the needs of black children with dyslexia who are underrepresented in most research, and they're absent from dyslexia advocacy spaces. If you’ve been to conferences or to workshops, you really don't see anyone who looks like me, or who looks like my son, or you see very few. They’re underdiagnosed or they're misdiagnosed, they receive no intervention, or they receive late intervention. For black children, the consequences are dire. The consequences are unforgiving. We're not talking about, I'm not going to get my dream job. We're talking about increased rates of poverty, homelessness, incarceration, all disproportionately impacting black children. The Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children is responding to this call, it's responding to this cry to act.
DS: There is so much to unpack on what you talked about. I want to go back to your journey with your son, and you talked about the “wait to fail” model. When I see it conducted in the research, it is a term that's used to show an outcry of what should be happening is we should not be waiting for our children to fail. And what I appreciate about your story is that you, you put a story to it. And I think sometimes we get lost in, we have this way to fail model, what do we do about it? I think the other piece that really has stuck with me was the focus on intersectionality, and specifically, you said your journey is not unique, that this is something that is systemic, that is societal. When you speak about the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children, what are those pillars or that those activities that you are working toward to make sure that you are increasing advocacy? One of the things that you talked about too is the research. Some of the work that I've been doing at Hopkins, we've been analyzing mainstream research verses research that really encompasses a diversity of identities. Tell me more about the activities that you're doing at the DABC in order to actualize this mission to advocate for communities of black children.
RC: 75% of our work is family-centered and this is really important to me. I think it probably will resonate with a lot of parents that are listening because we know the actions that we had to take in order to get our children to have access to a school like Windward, or to have access to an appropriate evaluation. And so there are things that work, right the things that work within communities, within families in order to increase access and advocacy. We want to create the support networks and creating a space for things like family chats that we have on a monthly basis. We speak with the community to identify the types of topics that are important to them, and then host workshops around those. We build out a real parent advocacy training program where we work with parents to help them learn to advocate for their student, but also to advocate for other students in their community, where they can not only support other students, but they can also train other parents to do this work.
And then, we're also within communities, we are acknowledging that it's a multi-generational issue. And this is not something that we talk about so much. When we're specifically talking about dyslexia, it's brain based. A lot of times you'll see a sibling with something related, or a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle. So, this is a family unit that may have been dealing with this for multiple generations, so we have to address that too. We can address that through family programs that support parents and caregivers and working with their child. That's really important. And that's, like I said, 75% of our work. In this in this virtual time, we can reach a lot of families. But it's really something that even virtually, we want it to feel community based. So in addition to things in communities, also create the space virtually as well.
The other part of our work is really bringing awareness to professional networks. We have our educators, we have our speech language pathologists, we have our school psychologists, and so bringing this general awareness, but also really working with the professional networks of black professionals in related fields. We spoke about this before and others might have heard me speak about us having these literacy and dyslexia warriors, and so they're out there advocating for structured literacy. Then, we have these equity warriors, and they understand sort the historical context that that has created these marginalized situations for communities. We need to bridge a gap there, we need to bring them together, because literacy, it overlaps. If we can make gains, if we can make changes to literacy outcomes for students, we can make a real change to their life outcomes. When I think about literacy, it certainly is not going to correct everything, but I really think there is this sort of protective nature, this protective factor that that when an individual has access, and they're able to interact with the written word. This is why I often talk about literacy as being a civil rights issue and as being a human rights issue, because it really impacts our life outcomes and it becomes really critical when we talk about equity. And then last but not least, we have a general sort of awareness campaign that has targeted messages for black communities. We all know of our CEOs who have dyslexia, and it's wonderful to hear these stories, but it needs to translate so that people can see others who look like them, who have had a variety of different experiences, who face challenges, but also the success stories because there are those out there. We want to increase representation, we want to remove stigma and educate and bring awareness that dyslexia exists and that black children can have dyslexia.
DS: I appreciate again, all of that you're unpacking here. When you talked about advocacy, you talked about professional communities and awareness. One of the things that I that you spoke about where there is this intersection, this overlap in equity and the historical implications. When we talk about racism and ableism, there's a historical societal implication of it, and I appreciate you bringing that to the forefront. And you also spoke about intersectionality, the intersectionality between race and literacy. I've read Dr. Crenshaw’s research and work who identified intersectionality to refer to how systems of oppression impact a person across various identities. We see how it is specifically intersecting people who identify across a marginalized race, gender or socioeconomic status. Can you bring intersectionality to the forefront of this conversation, and can you define it as it applies to race and students with dyslexia?
RC: Right. So like you, this term intersectionality, a term that was coined by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, and there's been work that's been done around it with a lot of her colleagues, it can be applied to how we understand identities, and not just identities, but multiple identities and how these identities can collide in a catastrophic way with power structures. and the systems that house these power structures. We can think about these power structures and the one that we're really talking about right now is our educational system. When you have these multiple identity identities, it magnifies and amplifies these inequities. One way to really think about this is that is very often and sometimes it's helpful to do this, but we compare. We'll compare a child with dyslexia to a black child, and we'll compare their experiences. And it can be helpful sometimes for someone to frame something to connect to it personally. But it’s not helpful to the black child who also has dyslexia. Because this type of comparison erases their experience. You’re black, and you have dyslexia. If we're just talking about a child with dyslexia or a black child, we're not thinking about what happens when you have both. What does that look like in the classroom? What does that look like in life? If we aren't even identifying black children with dyslexia, they're essentially invisible.
It’s also important because when we start to think about change, we start to think about policies and practices. Not only do you want to recognize that people may have multiple identities, but you need to be able to look at outcomes based on multiple identities. You can draft or create a policy or practice that addresses dyslexia and you can create one that you believe is perhaps addressing inequities. But you have to measure these outcomes for individuals who are experiencing these compounded, amplified inequities because of multiple social identities.
DS: Yes, and you talked about the data, I think it's extremely powerful. I'm even just thinking of the snapshot of data that the National Council on Learning Disabilities (NCLD) came out with about even disparities in special education. When you talk and you focus in on intersectionality, between disability status and race, and how that can be compounded, it reminds me of the school to literacy pipeline. That’s something that a lot of people have been talking about, for years. It is a societal and it is historical issue. When you look at the school to prison pipeline, what is the role of literacy and equity as it pertains to this pipeline?
RC: Yes, so absolutely, the school to prison pipeline is not new. We are certainly understanding sort of the entry points to this pipeline, as well as policies that can help students exit this pipeline, so that they're not fed into the prison system. What we're talking about our policies and practices that push children into the pipeline. Being in a school community that does not have a lot of resources certainly would do that having a disability. Having dyslexia which is, you know, a hidden disability, is not going to show up necessarily, physically, so it's really easy or it can be easy to ignore having dyslexia as a child of color. We start to think about children of color, and we have the research around that, where their behaviors are developmentally appropriate behaviors, but they often are penalized for them in a harsher way than their nonblack peers. The pipeline has a lot of entry points or those factors that can push you into it, where you start to not to be seen in the school system, or you're seen as a problem, and you're penalized for things that are out of your control, like having dyslexia. So if you're in a classroom, and it's expected that you're able to read and you're not reading, at some point, that dyslexia is going to morph into a behavioral issue, right. If it’s morphing into a behavioral issue, and you're a black child, and you know that if you if you have certain behaviors in the classroom, you're going to be reprimanded in a harsher way, then you are forcing that child through that pipeline. We see this with zero tolerance policies in schools, we see this with suspension of children as young as preschool, or for behaviors that are developmentally appropriate. Children can be adultified and they're penalized more harshly. And with, school safety officers, children are so used to have school safety officers in a lot of urban school districts, and it really forces children to deal with the juvenile justice system, which then of course, increases the likelihood that they are going to be incarcerated as adults.
There are a few studies that look at the population of incarcerated individuals, ones that is most mostly quoted is the Texas Prison Study. In that study, what they found was that 80% of incarcerated individuals had low literacy or they were illiterate. In that same population, almost half of them had characteristics of dyslexia and they hadn't been diagnosed with dyslexia. Here we have this high proportion of incarcerated individuals who have dyslexia, and it tells you that if it's not addressed in school, it turns into a behavior issue. The child doesn't feel like they belong in school, so they act out because it can also be low self esteem, which of course, is going to lead to decisions that are going to have a negative impact on your life. The other interesting thing about the school to prison pipeline, and some people will, if they're really honing in on dyslexia, they'll call it the dyslexia to prison pipeline, is that when we look at adult programs, and this is specifically adult programs, because if you're incarcerated as a juvenile, you're not going to be identified with just with dyslexia in the juvenile justice system, the practice is just not there to do that. But when they looked at adult programs for incarcerated individuals, when they infuse these programs with literacy, recidivism rates were reduced. So something happens.
I argue that it's something protective that happens when we introduce literacy into an individual's life that really allows for better outcomes. And so the real crime here is that we're not infusing literacy at the other end of that pipeline, in early education and in elementary school. We shouldn't have to do it in the prisons. We should be able to do that in our in our preschool, kindergarten, and first grade classrooms. And then we should have layers of protection to catch children who are falling through the cracks so that we can at any point along that journey, really infuse literacy into effective practices into into what the child is receiving. It really just highlights how much we can do and how much how much we know. And it's really becomes a matter of when we do it, do we do it in kindergarten? Or do we do it when we have an adult who's has already experienced this life of so many failures?
DS: There's so many things again, that I wanted to capture, and rewind as you were talking, because I'm like, wait, I have to ask her that follow up question. I have to ask this follow up question. I want to go back to what you said about multiple entry points to the school to prison pipeline, and specifically looking at dyslexia to prison pipeline. And the thing you highlighted that was really interesting to me that piqued my ears was when a black child with dyslexia enters school. And when that child exhibits developmentally appropriate behaviors, it's seen as a problem. I want to highlight how you said problem because there is a problem in the sense of the deficit thinking model that's here. When you were talking about the entry points to the school to prison pipeline, when you were citing statistics for children of color for black children with dyslexia, or just black children in general and the system of education, I kept hearing this deficit, the deficit based thinking that you were citing, and one of the things that I was thinking about and when you first shared your story, you highlighted to me your experience about the profound impact of stigma and bias that it can have on children. You also talked about the role that stigma plays on families. First, I want to unpack the role of bias and the role of deficit-based thinking. Can you elaborate more on that? Then I'll ask a little bit more about where this role fits in with parents. To summarize, I want to know a little bit more of this deficit-based model thinking versus asset based thinking and how it truly impacts black children with dyslexia.
RC: Deficit based thinking that's applied a lot in the schools, unfortunately, where when we see a child who's not accessing the curriculum, who is not performing in the way that we expect them to, that we think about, well, what's wrong with them? We sort of blame the child. We may blame the family, instead of thinking about, well, what curriculum am I using? What sort of professional development have I had? What sort of things can school and school leadership do to support a child? So instead, we shift the blame, and we start to pick apart what might be happening with the child. And this happens, certainly across all ethnic groups and racial groups. But historically, in black and brown communities, we've undervalued the actions and the contributions of communities of these communities in general, to the American experience. We have not highlighted many of the accomplishments. So it begins to create this space where we don't see these children or these communities as valuable as, as being a place that that has resources, or that have their own, you know assets or even the ability to contribute to the conversation. As a parent entering a school building, sitting on one side of the table, and the teacher and the special education coordinator and the school psychologist sitting on the other side of the table, and speaking to the parent, like they add nothing to the conversation or that they can add nothing to the conversation. And so blaming the child and blaming the family and creating this creating a narrative that we hear a lot, that if you work hard, that you should be able to achieve, right? It implies that if you're not achieving something, you have done something wrong, you haven't worked hard enough. There are parents who've heard this about their child, maybe if they worked harder. Well, if your child has dyslexia, I guarantee you the child's working pretty hard. They’re compensating in an environment that is not friendly to them to be able to participate in any way. It really ignores the individual and the strength that the individual brings to the classroom.
DS: Yeah, that's interesting that you bring that up. I’ve done a lot of reading in terms of how stigma and bias affect a child in the classroom. And when we were first talking and when you're talking right now, it reframed almost for me and brought to the forefront of just how impactful it can be on parents. I worked at a charter school before working at Windward, but most of my career has been spent at Windward as an independent school context. So, I'll never have that firsthand experience of sitting in a special education CSE meeting, for example. What I do know is that the law states that parents are an integral part of our CSE meetings and the IEP process. Why is this deficit-based model so pervasive for parents and specifically parents of kids with disabilities, or parents of kids that are going through the special education process?
RC: Well, the deficit-based model is really a way to shift blame, to shift responsibility, and to shift accountability. And it removes, you know, any call for action on the part of the school. And in black and in brown communities, it this sort of narrative that can also shape the way that a school will have a parent think about how their child fits into the school, as well. Maybe you’re not getting phone calls about your child not reading, but you're getting phone calls when the child has behavior that's upsetting the teacher or the or the classroom. You as a parent may not even know that there is a root cause that's present, because you're only hearing about this external visible behavior. For parents, a lot of times especially when you when you're talking about older children, it can be kind of hard to really dissect and figure out what’s really at the root of this and what’s really causing this disconnect between the child and the school building. Parents are blamed but certainly children, I think older children carry a lot of the blame for what's happening, and it's not theirs to carry. It’s the adults in their lives. I believe, at every point that if a child can do something, they do it, especially when we're talking about the younger ones, if they can do it, they do it. And if they're not doing it, then we have to reflect, what is it that I, as an adult, as a professional, are doing and how can I shift my practice to create a space for them to learn. In the school buildings, a lot of times, the practices are not based on research or evidence-based practices. We in schools are relying a lot on assumptions and on stereotypes, and this model of what we've been doing decade after decade that is not working. It fuels this deficit-based model of thinking in schools, and that is pushed into families that's ultimately damaging to the self-esteem of the child who's carrying all this weight.
DS: As you're talking and as this conversation is continuing, one of the key points that you keep circling back to is this importance of research-based and evidence-based practice, instead of relying on assumptions. I wanted to echo that, because that kept sticking with me. You did talk about research-based instruction and practices as one insight. Based on your research, your work in schools, your work and advocacy with families, what are the insights that you can provide to parents of black children with dyslexia, and particularly for the families and communities that experienced the challenge associated with access equity maybe facing a school environment where they just feel like they're so deterred from being an important or empowered person as part of the educational process of their child? Well, that was a really long question. I'll just say one more time, just so that maybe some of the readers might have lost what I was saying. It was an important point. I'll truncate it a little bit. What are those insights that you can provide to parents of black children with dyslexia, particularly for those parents that are experiencing the challenges related to lack of access or equity or feeling that they're not part of the process of their students or their child's education? There we go. That was a mouthful.
RC: You know, it's a difficult question because you're asking a question that really is speaking to a system that's failing. What do you tell a parent who has a child in a system that is failing their child with dyslexia and specifically, a black child with dyslexia? I always start from a place of acknowledging what you're feeling, even if you haven't completely connected all the dots, it's true, and it's real, and it's valid, because the system is broken. Right. That’s the starting place for a lot of conversations- it's acknowledging that it's hard. There are no quick and easy answers. It requires a significant amount of resources to go up against a system. In terms of the work, it's really, educating families about options. If you are facing this, what are your options? For every family, those options are going to be different. Some families might, depending on where you live, and this is dependent on your district, or some districts, maybe going the legal route might work for you. There are other districts where that's going to be really hard. You may spend years doing that and they're prepared to deal with a family who's going to sue them, because their child is not getting services. So it's kind of respecting where the family is, and giving them information because there are a lot of different pathways to getting your child help. We're talking about now is giving parents and giving families access to all of those pathways, and that's really through information sharing, and through support.
DS: You were talking about information sharing and support and I was thinking ahead to my last question. This might be something you want to elaborate on, and particularly looking at access and information and providing family with options and as we close up conversation. One of my last questions pertains to the purpose of READ. I created READ when I was sitting in a classroom teaching Eighth Grade at Windward. The goal was to sit at the intersection of research, education and advocacy. For me, and for all the guests on READ and for you. You’re illuminating, why the intersection between research education and advocacy is so important for the black child with dyslexia and their family. As you look ahead in the future of education, as we as a nation as a world are continuing to reckon with the pandemic, and with the great social reckoning that we've experienced over the past year, what are your hopes are next steps for the future of education to support black children with dyslexia?
RC: We’re at a very interesting point in our journey as a nation. The pandemics certainly highlighted the cracks in the foundation of many of our public institutions. Specifically here, we're talking about our educational system. It highlighted the inequities and the disparities for black and brown children, for children with less resources, and for children with disabilities. Again, we have to realize that any one of these identities intersecting with another can compound the negative outcomes for the child. The pandemic, this moment in time that we're in, did not create them. That’s really the big takeaway, although we have this moment where we can act because there's more of a focus on these inequities. It didn't create them, and we have to take a step back and look at what historically has existed that created this weak foundation. We have to do this in order to enact real policies and practices to bring about reform otherwise, we're just putting a band aid on things.
The other note about the pandemic, when I created the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children, I'm focusing on black children because that's my experience. I think we have to start respecting individuals in communities, in terms of coming up with solutions. If I wanted to come up with a solution for a community that didn't look like my own, I would partner with that community. Although I may bring in a different set of experience and a different toolbox and may bring in the research or professional background, I am not the one that's closest to that problem. I am not the one that's closest to the solution. I really focused this based on the data that we're seeing that shows the impact on black children with dyslexia, but also on the community that I know as well.
In doing this, what I'm recognizing, and decades of individuals have recognized, is that race is very central to most of the disparities that we see in education. So even when we start to control for other factors, and these other factors matter, they do matter. Even when we control for like socio-economic status, and we control for your geographic location, we still see the disparities are more pronounced by race. We have to center things around that, because we have a lot of history to address. I think that there are multiple paths forward, so we need to change our systems, we need to change our institutions.
For me as a mother who's here now, who's showing up now, we also need immediate solutions. Systems change takes a longer time. We need action now because we have a generation of students who we are setting up for failure. It really makes me think back the period of anti-literacy laws. Like I said, I use a historical lens for a lot of things. I think back to this period of enslavement of black Americans when it was illegal to learn to read and write and it was punishable by beatings. You might be sold and removed from your family. There was punishment for anyone who taught them to read such as free, black Americans and white Americans who were also helping enslaved black Americans. learn to read. During this period of time, less than 10% of enslaved black Americans were literate. In the period following emancipation, and through these dedicated and focused efforts on infusing literacy into communities, the rate went up to 70% This 70% is obviously before other policies came into play to dismantle these efforts, but it shows that it can be done when we have these types have really focused and dedicated efforts that have to undo wrongs.
I’m often reminded of the genius and a lot of these efforts and I'm not sure if you've heard of it, there was something called the Missouri Floating School. It was a school that was on a boat. It was on a boat because when literacy programs. I'm still talking about the same time period in history when they were put into community, so they might be in churches, in someone's home, they were dismantled. An individual came up with this idea to put the school on a boat, and they would float the boat out, outside of the jurisdiction of these laws that said that if you were formerly enslaved person, you couldn't learn to read. I mentioned this boat because we have this need for systems change, but we also have this need for something right now that we need to do to address the children that we’re failing.
When I think of one word, one word is a boat. When we're just one of these boats, it's a call to action. What's happening in in our public schools or even in our traditional private schools is failing children. We want to certainly influence greater change, but right now, we can have a solution. Of course, we need to increase access to these solutions. We know we need more Windwards, and we need Windward that exists in the Bronx and in other communities that are underserved. But we have models out there of remedies that we can deliver now. And it might like I said, it might be a Windward, or it might be private tutoring, or it might be community-based programs. There’s a call for action to change the systems and to come up with immediate solutions because there's a third grader, a fourth grader, a fifth grader sitting in a classroom right now, that is not being taught to read.
DS: I didn't know about the Missouri Floating School. Thank you for ending that way. I think that's such a powerful way to talk about this. I just finished writing my Beacon article for the Fall where I talk about systems change. You reframe that perspective for me that we need change now. What are we going to do for the children sitting in our classrooms right now? As a former windward teacher, and also just as a learner in general I'm going to be researching more reading more about the Missouri Floating School. Wow, Resha Conroy thank you so much. I wish I could go back and rewind that and listen to it again because there are so many important points that you said at the end. Last question for you, where can people learn more about the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children?
RC: Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here and to be able to share my story and information about the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children. The first place to go to is our website, and it is our name, www.dyslexiaallianceforblackchildren.org. You can contact us there. There is a page on there that you can click on and we will be posting events that we have like our monthly family chats, workshops, and we're certainly going to celebrate Dyslexia Awareness Month as well. We're going to be sharing something with families that I think they're going to love. It will be a surprise. Check the website to see what that is. That's how to contact us that's how to see to see what programming we have available. If you're interested in supporting us or want to figure out how you can work with us, you can also contact us there as well.
