Wichita businesswomen honored for work with dyslexic children

Jeanine Phillips had just stepped inside a math classroom at the Fundamental Learning Center on Monday when a 5-year-old girl named Piper rushed up to hug her around the legs.

Teaching has its rewards.

On Wednesday, Phillips and Gretchen Andeel, her partner in starting the center, were in Washington, D.C., to receive another kind of recognition.

The Small Business Council, a national organization with 20,000 members, named the Wichita women recipients of its annual humanitarian of the year award for their work with dyslexic children.

Phillips is the center’s executive director. Andeel, who is retired, chairs its board. The nonprofit learning center, now located on East 21st Street, has reached thousands of Kansas children with dyslexia, either directly or through training for their teachers and parents.

In 2001, Phillips and Andeel opened the Fundamental Learning Center in the Parklane Shopping Center, at Lincoln and Oliver. They focused on training parents and teachers to deal with dyslexia, although the center did offer a one-hour after-school class for children with the disability.

“We call it the ripple effect,” Phillips said of working with adults. “That way we can make a bigger impact.”

In 2014, they started a private school – the Rolph Literacy Academy – within the center for children with dyslexia and other reading difficulties. The first class had seven boys in it.

Then in early 2016, the center moved to its current location, which it leases from the city and which was previously used as a training center by Cessna. With 20,000 square feet, it’s about twice as large as the center’s previous location.

The center’s private school now has 31 full-time students, with room for perhaps twice that number. The center focuses on enrolling students ages 5 to 7, although it has some older students.

Its small classrooms are colorfully decorated and painted in nature scenes, while an open 5,000-square-foot space “is the room I fell in love with,” Phillips said.

“We use it for what I call messy science or art projects. We have rabbits back here. It’s a great space for so many things.”

The center continues to educate and train hundreds of adults a year, ranging from free lectures to graduate-level courses and distance learning classes for teachers as far away as Greece. Last year, 598 adults received some kind of center training.

It also screens children for learning difficulties, operates a summer reading program for children and refers children to private tutors who follow center course work but are not employed by it.

Funded by a combination of private grants, donations, tuition and fees, the center has 12 full-time staff and eight instructors who work on a part-time contract basis.

Phillips says dyslexia is misunderstood by many people, who equate it with “reading backwards.” What it actually is, she says, is a disability affecting the understanding of spoken and written language by people with normal intelligence.

It can’t be cured, but people with it can learn to read, write and spell efficiently. Because dyslexic children tend to be gifted in spatial tasks, the best methods of teaching dyslexia children tend to “very hands-on,” Phillips said.

She said she hopes the award will raise awareness of the center, which has mainly become known “parent to parent, teacher to teacher.”

In a wall in the center’s reception room are large photographs of the school’s first full-time students, who have returned to traditional schools.

“We’re talking to them, and they’re doing really well,” Phillips said.

This story was originally published May 10, 2017 at 3:10 PM with the headline "Wichita businesswomen honored for work with dyslexic children."