When Dr. Chanley Dudley’s 12-year-old son talks to her about school these days, he tells her he’s experiencing “max happiness.”
It wasn’t always this way. The Jacksonville pediatrician’s son is dyslexic, and learning was a challenge for him before Dudley discovered the DePaul School of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville.
Before her son entered the school, which uses a specialized instructional approach to educate students with dyslexia, Dudley said his attempts at reading would often end in tears and that he was so stressed he rarely spoke.
After he entered his new school, she said, “the layer came off of my true child.”
“He just blossomed,” Dudley said. “It was kind of like he found his people, because he started to learn the way his brain needed to learn. He literally just turned into this happy, ebullient and talkative child.”
Today, Dudley is president of the private school’s board of directors, and her son is thriving in DePaul’s classrooms.
The school also is going strong, thanks to a swell of support from government and philanthropic leaders in the community.
This year, classes began in a newly renovated building at 9750 Deer Lake Court near Southside Boulevard north of Butler Boulevard. Formerly the Sterlings on the Water event venue, the building has been converted to serve the school’s 140-member student body in grades 2 through 8.
Government, philanthropists step up
The school’s relocation from its former space along San Pablo Road near Beach Boulevard was made possible partly through a $1 million grant from Delores Barr Weaver, a $1.5 million grant from the Warren and Augusta Hume Foundation and an additional $1 million in donations from local investors.
In addition, the state of Florida provided $500,000 in funding in the state’s 2024-25 budget toward creation of the Florida Dyslexia Literacy Center, which would provide instruction to Florida teachers on the school’s specialized type of education, known as the Orton-Gillingham Approach.
Rep. Wyman Duggan, R-Jacksonville, and Sen. Clay Yarborough, R-Jacksonville, introduced the funding request in the state House and Senate, respectively, and guided it through the process.
“We have a whole list of wonderful supporters for the school, a lot of whom are older dyslexic individuals who’ve been really passionate about helping the younger generation have options and opportunities,” Dudley said.
With the new building up and running, the school is pursuing an expansion plan that includes adding a multipurpose room and playground to the building and creating the literacy center.
The effects of teaching more dyslexic children in Duval County to read will go well beyond the walls of DePaul, Dudley and the school’s administrators say. It has the power and potential to help tens of thousands of children graduate from high school, lift students out of generational poverty and reduce crime.
A time-tested approach
The Orton-Gillingham Approach was developed in the 1920s and is named for its founders, Samuel Torrey Orton, a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, and Anna Gillingham, an educator and psychologist.
The approach works for all learners, but DePaul staff say it’s the only proven method for teaching dyslexic children to read, write and spell.
Amber Oliveira, DePaul’s head of school for the past eight years, says that’s because of differences in the brains of people with and without dyslexia. Those with dyslexia respond to multisensory approaches versus standard lecture learning, and therefore DePaul instructors employ a variety of different methods to teach language lessons.
“They need to be presented with information visually, auditorily and most importantly hands-on – doing, exploring, experiencing,” she said. “In our classrooms, you’ll very rarely see a student sitting and a teacher talking, unless it’s just a very quick chat about something not related to academics. You’ll see them moving, you’ll see them creating, writing letters in sand, writing in chalk, writing in paint. We actually write directly on our tables, because we have whiteboard desktops. They love that.”
Because dyslexic students also don’t always commit sounds of words to memory, the school also teaches them to identify different ways that letter combinations are pronounced and also to break down words into prefixes, roots and suffixes to help understand them.
For example, Oliveira said, people without dyslexia might hear the words church, champagne and Christmas and remember that the letter combination c-h sounds different in all three. People with dyslexia need different methods to commit that lesson to memory, and the Orton-Gillingham Approach has a strategy for it.
Dudley says that through repetition, students learn language basics.
“It’s kind of like when you’re building your Legos, you have to get your foundation the right orientation, and then once you have your foundation you can build whatever you want on top of that,” she said. “So when a dyslexic kid’s brain gets the language and the literacy of the right orientation, then they can go on to be successful students and they can achieve anything.”
A greater need
Oliveira said about 1 in 5 people is dyslexic, which would translate to about 30,000 children in Duval County.
DePaul isn’t the only school that provides specialized teaching for students with dyslexia. Other options include Duval County Public Schools’ GRASP Academy, which also uses Orton-Gillingham. That school serves students grades 1 through 8.
But Oliveira said the county’s schools are serving only a fraction of the population of students with dyslexia. DePaul’s new building allowed the school to take on 45 new students, but its waiting list is still lengthy.
The DePaul Dyslexia Literacy Center would help address that need by training teachers to take the Orton-Gillingham Approach into their classrooms. Other goals for the center include offering literacy screenings for children and offering classes for parents who struggle with reading.
Dudley said many dyslexic children come from households where their parents also have dyslexia. She said dyslexic students who do not receive specialized instruction face a heightened risk of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and dropping out of school, which can lead to bigger problems later in life.
Dudley said 85% of incarcerated people have trouble reading, with about half of those individuals being dyslexic. Giving children the services they need could help them stay out of the system, she said.
Expanding services
The DePaul School of Northeast Florida was established in 1980 by a group of Jacksonville parents who recognized a need for specialized instruction for dyslexic students.
Dudley learned about it during the pandemic, when her son was diagnosed with dyslexia. She said she and her husband sought the diagnosis after seeing her son struggle while he was being homeschooled during the pandemic.
“He really wasn’t taking in information well,” she said. “Reading was just such a struggle. He would cry, and we would cry.”
With the diagnosis, Dudley said she and her husband went into “all hands on deck mode” and began scouring the community for services. She found DePaul and took a tour.
“I literally left with the hair standing up on my arm,” she said. “It was just such a magical experience within that classroom. The kids were all engaged.”
Now, after her son began his sixth-grade year at DePaul, Dudley is working to spread word about the school and help establish the Literacy Center.
“I’m just happy to help get the story out there so that more kids can be helped too,” she said.