Children with Dyslexia get a Leg Up in Lancaster
Monday, Octber 11, 2004
By Charles Lardner
The Intelligencer Journal [PA]

Public schools were failing Lisa Brenaman's children until she discovered the Masonic Learning Center for Children with Dyslexia."We've had a really hard time with public schools," Brenaman, of Mount Joy, said Sunday at the center's Stride for Success walkathon fund-raiser at Franklin & Marshall College.

"Once you bring to their attention your child has a problem, you get treated differently," Brenaman said. "There is a herd mentality. They just get pushed through with the pack or fall by the wayside."

At $75 an hour for private tutoring, Brenaman would have found it difficult to pay for the help her 9-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter needed, but the center, funded entirely by private donations to the Scottish Rite Masonic organization, has given her children the help they need for free.

About 30 walkers hoofed around the track Sunday at Williamson Field to raise money for the center.

Now entering its third year of operation on the first floor of the Masonic building at 213 W. Chestnut St., the center has reached its goal of 19 students from a modest first-year class of three.

At an annual cost of about $5,000 per student, the Masons need ongoing financial assistance, said Scott Stoner, spokesman for The Valley of Lancaster, the local chapter of the Scottish Rite.

The $4,000 to $5,000 that the walkathon is expected to raise will go toward training teachers and the general operation of the center.

"Our approved budget for the 2004-05 school year is $110,000, and we're not going to raise that all alone," Stoner said. "Every center raises as much as they can, and our corporate center in Lexington, Ky., covers (the rest)."

For example, Stoner said, The Valley of Lancaster had to raise half of the cost to build the center, and the corporate headquarters covered the rest.

The center cost $65,000 to build, and it couldn't have happened, Stoner said, without an individual contribution of $15,000 from Helen S. Duncan of Lancaster and her deceased husband, Harold Duncan, who was a 32nd-degree Mason.

Brenaman is grateful to all the people who contribute to the center. The coping skills Brenaman's children have learned there have allowed them to make marked improvement in reading and understanding the material in their classes, she said.

Students with dyslexia often have discipline problems as well. Frustrated by their academic troubles, they act out.

Brenaman said she witnessed it herself in her son and daughter.

"My children used to come home very depressed and very anxious," Brenaman said. "They were so upset with themselves. They couldn't understand why they couldn't read and couldn't perform, and they got into trouble because they acted out of their frustration.

"They were just trying to make someone aware they were having trouble."