San Antonio’s Celebrate Dyslexia, known for championing dyslexia services for children, is now working directly with educators who want to help students with the learning disability in the classroom.
The Academic Language Therapy Association, a national group that sets standards for language therapy certifications, recently granted Celebrate Dyslexia’s train program an “independent course approval.”
This means educators who go through Celebrate Dyslexia can now earn college credits for related masters or doctorate degrees, and the nonprofit can train students in teacher preparation programs at local universities and school districts.
Celebrate Dyslexia has long offered dyslexia treatment training programs, using the Texas Dyslexia Handbook as a guiding light. The nonprofit even opened a charter school in 2024 dedicated to serving dyslexic students.
But trainees of the nonprofit’s academic language therapy certification courses had to jump through hoops to even be able to test for certifications through ALTA and the state.
“There was more paperwork and it wasn’t always a guarantee” that trainees would qualify for a certification test, said Jasmine Dean, who founded Celebrate Dyslexia in 2019 after struggling to find the necessary services for her dyslexic son.
The nonprofit already has an agreement with the University of Texas at San Antonio’s College of Education and Human Development, and is currently working on formalizing partnerships with other universities.
How to treat dyslexia
Dyslexia is a neurobiological learning disability, and those that have it struggle to spell, read and comprehend what they’re reading.
Covered under federal and state special education services, schools usually give extra testing time and reading screens to dyslexic students.
Students can also work with certified academic language therapists or practitioners, and receive intense therapy that combines visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses in lessons that build on each other and focus on repetition.
Dyslexia is often misunderstood, said Saray Ayers, a reading teacher at River City Believers Academy and a certified academic language practitioner in training at Celebrate Dyslexia.
“We all grew up thinking dyslexia was looking at letters backwards,” she recalled. “But reading isn’t just the ability to take the words off the page… If they’re decoding the words but not comprehending, they’re not reading.”
Sophia Gutierrez, who is also taking the training course, said she wants the credential to combat illiteracy.
“Illiteracy is an epidemic,” said Gutierrez, a kindergarten teacher at Northside Independent School District. “You have to read to do anything… It’s a basic human right that I think every person deserves to have.”
Some of Celebrate Dyslexia’s trainees aren’t educators, but parents who want to help their own children. Like Janalen Fischer, who flew into San Antonio from Tennessee for a condensed version of the training.
Fischer’s eighth-grade son was recently diagnosed with dyslexia, after attending a private school for four years.
“Nobody caught it. Nobody mentioned a thing to me, which is frustrating,” Fischer said.
Dyslexia experts say it’s common for students not to get a diagnosis, or even a screening, until middle school, when reading comprehension gaps become harder to ignore.
Several studies also show that 1 in 5 children probably have dyslexia, but most go undiagnosed. Last year, Texas only reported 6.4% of students as dyslexic.
In the San Antonio area, including surrounding counties and parts of South Texas, state data shows public schools only reported about 5.6% or 28,207 students as dyslexic. Dean says the regional number should be closer to 100,000.
And experts say struggling to read in school often leads to long-term consequences. According to the National Institute of Health, about 80% of Texas inmates are functionally illiterate and about half show signs of dyslexia.
Not enough dyslexia specialists
Part of the problem is a shortage of people trained to recognize the signs of dyslexia and how to treat it.
Dean says that House Bill 3928, passed by the Texas Legislature in 2023 to reform dyslexia services, compounds the shortage problem. The bill requires any student who needs dyslexia services go into special education, shifting the primary service provider from reading specialists to special education teachers, who may not have the licensure to treat dyslexic students.
According to ALTA, there’s only about 130 certified language therapists in San Antonio. When Dean was looking for a therapist for her son back in 2019, she said there were only 31.
To get to the point where someone can even test to become a certified academic language practitioner (CALP), trainees need 700 hours of training in the field, 200 hours of coursework and 10 observations.
Getting the CALP certification takes around two years, and Celebrate Dyslexia front-loads a lot of the coursework during the summer with in-person workshops.
Dean doesn’t take all the credit for the increase of dyslexia therapists in the past few years— there are two other dyslexia learning centers in San Antonio — but Celebrate Dyslexia has bolstered the number of language therapists in the area.
Celebrate Dyslexia is also working on open source coursework on dyslexia therapy. Karen Kohler, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, is leading the effort and says a pilot version for grades K-1 could be published this year.
Kohler hopes the coursework can bridge the gap between teacher preparation programs and practical experience. She said several teachers feel like they weren’t initially prepared in how to teach kids how to read, dyslexic or not.
“But one of the hurdles that we have is that as faculty, we don’t have access to the same K–12 curriculum that’s in all the schools… This is going to allow us to bring in the systematic explicit instruction materials to train our teacher candidates.”
