Working in Clark County: Teresa Tollen, owner of Teresa’s Little School

Mace Koski, 8, is shown a square with the text “This tall wall.”

When asked to read it aloud, he twice repeats “This talk wall.”

Teresa Tollen, 49, works with him, and explains that because he has dyslexic tendencies, he has a tough time reading words that rhyme.

“His brain doesn’t want to do it,” she said. After a few tries and encouragement, he does, and she claps her hands in excitement. Mace then moves a turtle piece forward on a handmade game board used to practice reading and writing rules created by the Susan Barton program for dyslexia.

Tollen has made helping children who struggle with dyslexia her life’s battle cry, after seeing her own son — now 21 — struggle with the disorder. She has channeled the passion into her own business, Teresa’s Little School in La Center, a preschool and after-school tutoring program which focuses on students who struggle with the disorder.

“Regarding the tutoring, I’d say 90 percent of our students are dyslexic, and with that can be a list of other underlying learning and behavior disorders such as attention hyper deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.,” she said.

According to the International Dyslexia Association, dyslexia is the most common cause of reading, writing and spelling difficulties. It’s a neurological disability characterized by difficulties with accurate or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.

As awareness of the disorder grows, more parents are seeking help for their children, Tollen has observed. Teresa’s Little School recently expanded to accommodate more children. Starting with a small group of students in 2015, Tollen said they’re now helping 220 students. She previously was a paraeducator at La Center Elementary School.

Most students, however, aren’t formally diagnosed with dyslexia, she said. Out of 220 students, she said about a dozen have been handed down a diagnosis from a doctor. Instead, she works with a California-based company called Dynaread, which offers a free online screening for dyslexia. She said going to a doctor to be diagnosed can be expensive and considers it not to be an imperative process unless it’s needed for insurance or required by a school.

“A lot of schools don’t (require a diagnosis) anymore. They accept the tendencies because they see the child struggling already, and then they can do their own assessments on top of that to move forward,” Tollen explained.

Tollen’s passion for helping students who struggle with dyslexia started when her oldest son, Carsten Robinson, started struggling in third grade while he was a student in Hockinson School District.

“Something was just not right,” she said. “When it started affecting him emotionally, that was that. I needed to find an answer and do something about it.”

He was diagnosed with dyslexia and started going to vision therapy. With his form of dyslexia, words jump around the page. However, the vision therapy wasn’t working and the tests were giving him severe migraines.

“I learned that dyslexia was more of a communication disorder, not a vision disorder, so I pulled him out of vision therapy,” she said. “It was very hard. At the time, his dad wasn’t real receptive of things like that.”

Things got more difficult when she and her then-husband endured a divorce, and her son, she said, “threw in the towel” and dropped out of school.

But she kept championing him, and he eventually received a GED. Now in his second year at Washington State University in Pullman, Tollen said he is excelling.

Tollen, who remarried her Burns, Ore., high school sweetheart and co-owns the business with him, works with the local schools to guide assignments. Additionally, Tollen will work with teachers regarding specific students — like suggesting that they use a particular color paper for assignments if the student struggles competing an assignment on stark white paper.

She’s happy to see more awareness and hopes it continues. Recently, the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction convened a Dyslexia Advisory Council which plans to identify tools and resources to help screen for dyslexia by June 2019. By 2020, it will develop recommendations on best practices for implementing the screenings into school districts, staff training and more.

“I think a lot of teachers … see (dyslexia) as the flipping (of letters) and that’s all they know about it,” Tollen said. “They don’t really have the time or money to educate themselves. To me, that’s the school’s responsibility to educate their teachers and arm their teachers with all they need in order to help and identify these students.”