Belmont resident Joe Looney was in third grade when he was diagnosed with dyslexia.
At the time, he didn’t know what that meant. What he remembers, however, is leaving his classroom throughout the day at Winn Brook Elementary School to meet with a literacy specialist. He also remembers feeling isolated from his peers.
“My peers were always wondering why I wasn’t in the classroom,” he said.
According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty with reading in an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. People with dyslexia have trouble matching the letters on the page with the sounds those letters and combinations of letters make.
By the end of third grade, Looney’s family enrolled him at the Carroll School in Lincoln, which specializes in educating students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.
“While the support I was getting in Belmont was good, it really wasn’t enough support to help me overcome the diagnosis and feel like I was fitting in with the school environment,” said Looney, 18. “Carroll … was a great fit. It really helped me develop all my skills and led me to be independent and successful in high school.”
Now a student at Beaver Country Day School, Looney wants to pay it forward and help other students who may be struggling with a new dyslexia diagnosis but lack the financial means to attend a school like Carroll.
“It’s really not normal what I got to experience,” he said. “I know being able to send your kid to a school like Carroll is really expensive and not always accessible.”
With Gabi Raymond, a fellow Carroll School alum, Looney co-founded The Dyslexia Mentorship Initiative, which aims to provide opportunities for dyslexic students to meet with other dyslexic students.
“We thought, why don’t we give back what we didn’t have at that age,” said Raymond, 17.
While they received academic support, she said, they didn’t get much social support.
“Just talking and listening— I don’t think we had someone like that,” said Raymond, who now attends Gann Academy in Waltham.
Together, Raymond and Looney began by creating a social media presence and hanging posters and signs around town, advertising the new initiative. People began reaching out to be paired up with a mentor, Looney said. Partners can talk on the phone, via email, or meet in person.
“If there was another student I could have spoken to early in my diagnosis, I think it would have given me a lot more hope for the future,” Looney said.
There are eight mentors total, he said, all of whom were also Carroll School students.
“We have a pretty good network of old friends and individuals who had the same experience as me and want to help individuals who have been recently diagnosed,” Looney said.
In conversations with mentees, Looney has found many of them had a similar overwhelming experience understanding and overcoming their diagnosis.
“I was in third grade. I had no idea [what it meant] when my parents told me I was dyslexic and I’d be moving to a school I didn’t really want to go to,” he said.
Raymond also sees herself in many of the students she mentors.
“[I was] timid, nervous,” she said. “I thought there was something wrong, or different, about me.”
Growing up, Looney struggled with whether to admit to certain people he was dyslexic. Sometimes, he still does.
“My biggest goal is to erase that stigma and show that even if you have dyslexia, you’re still equal to your peers,” he said. “It’s not necessarily something negative. … I want students to see that and feel that.”
He hopes the mentorship gives students hope for their own futures.
“Just because they have this diagnosis does not mean they are less than someone else,” he said. “That’s just one unique aspect of you.”
The Dyslexia Mentorship Initiative is hosting an Understanding Dyslexia Family Summit on Saturday, Dec. 21, via Zoom. Mentors will present information about dyslexia and discuss their personal experiences navigating both primary and secondary education with dyslexia. A question and answer session will follow. Looney said he hopes to be able to host an in-person event in the future.
To register for the event, for more information, or to get set up with a mentor, go to dyslexiamentorshipinitiative.org.
