The Stern Center for Language and Learning is celebrating 30 years of helping students with learning style differences reach their full potential. Over the past three decades the Stern Center has supported more than 20,000 children and adults in overcoming their struggles with dyslexia, learning disabilities, autism, language disorders and other learning style differences, including giftedness.
“I know so many parents who have read to their children since they were in the womb and yet see sad faces on these same children who later hate reading- because they don’t know how,” said Stern Center president and founder, Dr. Blanche Podhajski. “If your child has trouble with sounds, reading words, spelling or understanding vocabulary and text, she or he may need more explicit teaching.”
Helping children struggling with these learning challenges was the original inspiration for the Stern Center. From humble beginnings in 1983, with three staff members serving under 100 students a year, the Stern Center has grown exponentially and now operates two offices, one in West Lebanon, NH and one in Williston, VT, and serves more than 1,000 students each year.
“The Stern Center’s thirty years of service as a nonprofit learning organization has coincided with an explosion in brain research,” said Dr. Podhajski. “Neuroscience discoveries have identified the neural signature for dyslexia and showed how good teaching can shift brain activity in struggling readers.”
Using research-based, best practices, the Stern Center provides learning evaluations, direct instruction, professional learning courses and workshops, and communication services for autism and other speech and language disorders. It also offers Building Blocks for Literacy®, an early literacy education program for educators, early childcare providers and parents to support them in teaching early literacy skills to three- to five-year-olds.
“I am ever excited and humbled by the Stern Center's evolution from a small, community organization to an internationally recognized resource providing for children and families,” Podhajski said.
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The Stern Center for Language and Learning is a nonprofit dedicated to enriching the lives of all learners because all great minds don’t think alike. It has offices in Williston, VT and West Lebanon, NH. Scholarships are available. More information may be found at www.sterncenter.org.
Source: Stern Center for Language and Learning, June 19, 2014