Jayson’s Story

When Jayson enrolled in our summer 2020 curriculum pilot, his mother shared that his vision and hearing impairments have made it difficult to address his speech apraxia and dyslexia. Despite being in fourth grade, he struggled to achieve more than 20% accuracy when decoding short-vowel words and consonant blends. Moreover, years of low literacy achievement had given Jayson low self-efficacy; during his sessions he would often hide behind his stuffed lion, Roary, when he felt frustrated and overwhelmed.   

Every day for two weeks, Jayson, accompanied by Roary, worked through Achieve Now’s updated virtual curriculum with his coach, Mary. The virtual format made it easy to adjust volume and image setting to accommodate his hearing and vision impairments, and the structured lessons scaffolded concepts clearly and developed phonemic awareness skills that addressed the core literacy development he needed. After our first session, his mother asked for a copy of the lesson we had just done; “I want to send this to his speech therapist so they can keep using these methods! Whatever you did really clicked!”  

Achieve Now’s scripted curriculum emphasizes growth mindset and process praise, which instills a sense of accomplishment and ability in students. Little by little, Jayson stopped relying on Roary. By their sixth session together, Roary didn’t make an appearance at all as Jayson approached new words with confidence, telling Mary, “Don’t help me! I can do it now!”   

By the end of their two weeks together, Jayson showed a 57.1% improvement in his decoding ability and phonemic awareness. He was also able to encode words almost 60% more quickly than he was when he started the program. His mom reported that he was using the strategies he learned during his coaching sessions with his speech therapist and teaching his parents how to segment unfamiliar words to find the letter sounds.  

Jayson entered the 2020-21 school year not only with stronger foundational literacy skills, but with the confidence that he could accomplish difficult tasks. According to his mom, “This program is an absolute life saver. Thanks to you, we're starting the year with not only no summer slide, but no COVID slide either!”  

“This program is an absolute life saver. Thanks to you, we’re starting the year with not only no summer slide, but no COVID slide either!” 

—Jayson’s mom