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Recordings help dyslexic students
Teacher graduated college using service
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Published: June 19, 2009
Elementary-school teacher Amanda Hummel is 29, but she still remembers the taunts of classmates during her early years in school.
Found to have dyslexia in the second grade, Hummel had great difficulty reading with the same speed and confidence as her peers.
"I hated when teachers would call on me to read," she said.
But during her freshman year at Meredith College in Raleigh, her outlook changed.
Meredith's Office of Disability Services told her about Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, which could provide Hummel with recordings of her textbooks to help her manage her dyslexia.
She soon received all of her textbooks for the semester on audio tapes, which improved her academic and social life.
"I was, for the first time, totally independently successful by myself," said Hummel, who used the service all through college. "I wasn't ashamed of my disability anymore."
Hummel is one of many students to benefit from Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, a 60-year-old national nonprofit that initially offered textbook recordings to World War I veterans blinded by their injuries.
The group's North Carolina office opened in Durham in 2005 and now serves almost 6,000 students in the state.
Volunteers record textbooks and other learning materials for blind and learning-disabled students from pre-kindergarten to Ph.D. candidates.
Students can download recordings from the program's Web site whenever they need them.
Eleanor Boyd, the program's Southeast regional director, said that the recordings bolster students' focus and comprehension.
"It's really like a whole new world has opened to them," Boyd said. "It just gives them incredible confidence."
The nonprofit group spends about $250 a year per eligible student to offer their individual services free of charge, Boyd said.
The North Carolina chapter had a $465,000 budget last year, including $90,000 in state funding, but will operate on about $250,000 as the organization grows more efficient in the coming year, Boyd said.
Schools pay a yearly fee of $350 to $950 for the service, which provides recordings for students and training for staff.
Barbara Scantland, the director of student support services at the Summit School in Winston-Salem, recommends the program to some of her students.
She said that the recordings provide detailed descriptions of graphs and visual elements in textbooks that help them grasp the material.
Tom Keleher, a Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic national board member, operates a recording studio in his basement in Asheville, where he records textbooks and novels.
Besides helping students, he said, recording books educates him on a variety of topics.
Keleher's reading assignments have ranged from Casino Royale to The Power of Grammar.
"The big incentive is hearing the stories of the students whose lives have been changed through the use of these materials," Keleher said.
Hummel said she wished that she had known about Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic earlier.
When Hummel was a child, her mother read books aloud with her, an effective but time-consuming process.
Hummel's ADHD did not help matters. Any movements or noises in the classroom would distract her from school assignments. Though taking Ritalin helped, managing her dyslexia was a constant struggle.
In college, she had to pass a reading test to graduate. After taking the test for the seventh time, Hummel wrote her score on her hand and knew it was not good enough.
But when a professor called her two weeks later to ask why Hummel did not tell her she passed the test, Hummel realized that she had misread the score.
"That's when my dyslexia was clear again to me," she said.
Hummel earned a bachelor's degree in child development and now teaches significantly disabled students at Hilburn Drive Elementary School in Wake County.
■ Christian Kloc can be reached at 727-7270 or at ckloc@wsjournal.com.
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