A Chance To Grow - Brain-Centered Therapy Services

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Seeing the Invisible Problem

7/14/2022

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For as long as he can remember, Samson has had vision problems. When he was young, he was always tripping over things, misjudging distances. He was given glasses at an early age, but even with them, he had trouble seeing.
This became a problem in school. He had no trouble learning to read, he could understand what he read, but the actual act of reading was exhausting. As he grew older, and school required more extensive reading of longer and more complicated texts, he would get so tired while working on assignments, he’d want to go to sleep. He tried to compensate by reading at his own pace, but that only worked some of the time, he’d still get tired. Reading for school became stressful and frustrating, so much so that he’d want to give up.
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He gave up reading for pleasure, and instead turned to video games, playing repetitive games whose patterns he could remember so he didn’t have to track with his eyes so much.

But Samson is a smart guy with a wide range of interests and a determination to get ahead.  Despite his reading problems, he graduated from a rigorous private school and got a BA from the University of Minnesota.  He loves theatre and dance, history and politics.  He is fluent in a second language, Spanish, and having visited Spain twice, his long-term goal is to move there.
​

But none of these accomplishments came easily. He says his vision issues were an “invisible problem” that bedeviled his teachers and friends – everyone knew he was smart, but couldn’t understand why he had trouble keeping up with his work. He has loving, concerned parents who did everything they could think of to help him, encouraging him, taking him to specialists, including regular eye doctor visits. Optometrists would prescribe glasses, but his problems persisted. As Samson discovered when he came to A Chance To Grow’s Vision Clinic, the problem was, they were focusing only on his eyes, not on the eye/brain connection that was at the root of his problem.
Samson has been to multiple specialists who were unable to help him with his vision and related issues and when a family friend referred him to ACTG, it seemed like a last resort, which we find is often the case with our clients. Our vision clinic, run by Dr. Shelby May, OOD, specializes in developmental vision, that is, the relationship between the eye itself and visual processing in the brain. And finally, Samson and his parents got answers.

Dr. May used our newest tool, the cutting-edge RightEye vision system, which uses a computer to track eye movements, generating data hundreds of times more accurate than even the most skilled doctor could give based on her own observations. This generated a picture of how Samson's eyes track what he sees, and it was clear what his problem was: His eyes have great difficulty tracking.
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When Samson’s mother saw the evidence, she cried. It was the first time in Samson’s 31 years that anyone could show her what was wrong.

With the information generated by the program, Dr. May was able to diagnose Samson with Oculomotor Dysfunction and Accommodative Excess, meaning his eyes have difficulty tracking, and he overcompensates to correct. She also found that his glasses prescription is anisometric,
meaning he has a large difference in the prescription for each eye. Those issues have made it very difficult for his two eyes to develop in a way that worked together. It also profoundly affects his depth perception.

This explains so much of what Samson has experienced. When eyes can’t work together, sustained attention for near tasks, like reading, are straining and exhausting. Ultimately vision is uncomfortable and demotivating, affecting vision-driven tasks. That’s basically everything: reading, driving, learning, even walking around and knowing where you are in space depend on those skills.   
​Dr. May prescribed eye exercises, which Samson has been doing regularly at home, as well as sessions on equipment in the office. The plan is based on very careful goal setting that emphasizes mastery of individual skills. When each skill is mastered, Dr. May and Samson will carefully put them together, giving Samson control of his system as a whole. After that, it’s just continued practice and maintenance. “The whole process is Samson’s work,” says Dr. May, “I’m just facilitating and giving him the best tools I have for him to regain control.”
​

​Samson reports that he never realized his eyes were jumping so much. Since beginning his vision therapy, he says he can see things much better. He is hoping one day soon, he will be able to drive, and become more independent. He says, “Tell people it’s important to ask questions and look at things differently, find someone who will look for deeper issues. It wasn’t about the eye itself, it was about the eye/brain connection.”
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A Family Affair

7/14/2021

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Linda Nesenson has been part of A Chance To Grow’s family – and we’ve been part of hers – since 1994. Her journey mirrors ours, as this story demonstrates.

Linda’s second son, Matthew, born in 1988, began having issues with focus and hyperactivity as a toddler. By the time he was in kindergarten, the impact was obvious: “He was so overwhelmed with everything that was going on,” remembers Linda, “he would just laugh and laugh, he didn’t know what to do. He would go full force and conk out.” He was so disruptive to the class, he spent half the day in the hallway on a chair because they didn’t know what to do with him.

​By the time he was six, his pediatrician had diagnosed him with ADHD and had put him on Ritalin.  “It wasn’t doing anything, so they just wanted to keep upping and upping the dosage,” recalls Linda, “so he developed a tic, eye blinking, and I said, ‘no, we’re not doing this.’ The saving point came when I saw a flyer advertising the Boost Up Program.”
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Linda, pictured next to a photo of herself and a child receiving vision therapy, taken 20 years ago.
This was being offered by New Visions, ACTG’s alternative school designed specifically to help children like Matt who had trouble learning. As part of his enrollment process, Matt received a number of assessments he’d never had before.  “His pediatrician never asked me, ‘did he crawl on his tummy, did he creep on his hands and knees?’ I had no idea that was important. I had taken him to the eye doctor to have his vision checked and they would tell me his eyes were healthy and that he had 20/20 vision, but at New Visions, where they did the telebinocular screening, I learned that he had depth perception problems and his pinch grasp was very weak, which explained playing catch and holding a crayon to color was of no interest.”

At the time, New Visions offered the occupational and vision therapy Matt needed in addition to the Boost Up program, so Linda enrolled him there in 1994. Like Matt, his cousin Ryan was also struggling and he was also enrolled in the school. Her cousin was a paraprofessional in the 1st grade, where Matthew and Ryan started. Linda soon started volunteering in the classrooms, and was ultimately hired as an educational assistant in 1998. Her sister, Ryan’s mother Teresa, came to work in the school office shortly after. When New Visions school came under the umbrella of ACTG and moved to the current location (later in 2003), her husband Gary came to work as a janitor, and so the family affair continued.

At the time, New Visions was housed at St. Bridget’s and offered Boost Up for children in grades 1-8. Students went to Boost Up five days a week as part of their daily schedule. There, Linda knew Boost Up was where she wanted to be. The success of the program with those students led the staff to consider ways to bring the program to more children. Hence the Minnesota Learning Resource Center, and the S.M.A.R.T. Program (Stimulating Maturity through Accelerated Readiness Training) came into being. Designed to easily incorporate the Boost Up approach into K-3 and Pre-K classrooms, the program has trained thousands of teachers in Minnesota and across the country, providing countless children with the brain development needed to succeed in school and beyond.

Matthew stayed with the program through the fifth grade. In addition to occupational and vision therapy, Matt and Ryan received brain training via Audio-Visual Entrainment (AVE), which helps people self-regulate emotions. Both boys began to improve. “Matthew could handle the group situation, he wasn’t sitting in the hallway, he just got more engaged, more involved in what was going on, he could read, he was learning, he was calmer.”  Linda recalls that Matt’s kindergarten teacher had predicted that he would never be able to read. After he had been at New Visions for a while, the paraprofessional took him back to that teacher’s room, and said “Matthew would like to
read something for you.” And he did.
PictureLinda (right), pictured with a Summer Boost Up class from 2006.
Today, Matthew is grown up, steadily employed at a local store for the last seven years, and the father of four-year-old Xander. “If it wasn’t for my experience with New Visions, with A Chance to Grow, I would not have been able to recognize early that Xander had challenges. “First thing is the speech, he wasn’t saying words and he’s not playing like a neurotypical toddler.” He was diagnosed with Autism, low on the spectrum and sensory seeking. She told Xander’s mom that she should bring him to ACTG for an occupational therapy evaluation. Today, Xander is receiving speech and occupational therapy at A Chance to Grow.

While Matthew left New Visions for middle school, and has since gone on to lead a wonderful life, Linda remained at ACTG. It was her second career, after spending 25+ years in the telephone answering service, but, she says, “Boost-Up became my first love.” Over the years, her involvement has grown and changed, just as the agency has. Eventually, she also worked for the AVE program, Vision program, and as it expanded, the Clinical Services department as a clinical assistant. She has never formally retired because, as she says, this has become a family affair too. “The people here, they mesh so well together. I think it’s because the love and dedication they have in helping children be successful is a common goal. She says, because of that shared goal, “the staff is like family, too.”
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Doing Everything In Her Power

1/14/2021

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“As a kid, I had a harder time reading,” says Leah, a veteran educator currently with the Eau Claire, WI school district and a long-time S.M.A.R.T. advocate, whose passion for teaching and love for her students are palpable.  “And I want to do everything in my power to prevent others from struggling.”
Her first teaching experiences with 4th and 5th grade bi-lingual students, convinced her that early education was where she belonged: “My highest reader was at a 2nd grade level and the rest of the students were at pre-primer. I needed to be somewhere where I could make a difference before these kids even start to learn how to read. So, I moved to kindergarten the following year, which was perfect because then I could give them a solid foundation.”
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After several years in the classroom, Leah found herself in a position to support other teachers – as an educational consultant, instructional coach, literacy coach, Title I teacher, among other roles. While teachers were telling her that student behavior was their biggest problem, as a literacy coach and Title I teacher, she noticed that many children were having reading issues. “I had several kids, I could actually see their eyes doing different things on the pages, or they’d look at me and their eye would bounce, and I thought ‘something is going on there.’”  Then she attended a training for a movement-based program that dealt with dyslexia. Her original teacher training had included very little about brain-related issues or the importance of movement to development. This new perspective changed her. “I started telling parents, ‘you might want to get their eyes checked, I’ve been noticing some things’ and parents wrote to me to say, ‘There was an issue, thanks for telling us!’  I thought, this is knowledge that everybody needs to have.  It’s great and more students could be helped.”
​

Several years later, when she attended a three-day S.M.A.R.T. training, it was revelatory: “Every time I heard a story I thought ‘oh, that was that kid.’ I remember having an a-ha moment: They showed us how the alligator crawl is really good for reading comprehension, and I thought, ‘why have I not been doing this the whole time with the struggling readers?’”
She brought S.M.A.R.T. home as a summer program first. “I had about six kids – two of my own and four other kids. I did a S.M.A.R.T. circuit, for an hour and a half, with stations, and some reading interventions as well. A few kids had dyslexia and I remember, when they did tactile trackers, [they’d say] ‘oh my eyes they hurt!’ and I said ‘well good, that’s what you want! This is the right activity for you!’ Their parents said, ‘This is amazing, more schools need to be doing this.’ One parent, who was a special ed teacher at the high school level, said ‘Leah, more kids could benefit from this,” I said, “I know, I agree!”
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Movement Anchors Learning!
Movement influences the ability to concentrate in a classroom and to learn to read and write. The body is designed to move. Research shows purposeful, specific, and systematic physical movement can affect the brain in a very positive and dramatic way. Physical activity helps create an optimal learning condition for the brain by:
  • Increasing dendrite branching and creating more neural connections.
  • Stimulating the brain to produce faster connections.
  • Feeding the brain glucose and oxygen, which are brain food.
Leah began to advocate for all teachers in the district to incorporate S.M.A.R.T. into their classrooms. Last year, district administrators went all in, arranging for all teachers and assistants to get trained. “The first time through the training, some of [the teachers] said, ‘oh my gosh, I thought this kid was doing this because they were misbehaving but really, they had this sensory or auditory processing or vision issue.’  They started to see behaviors differently, which I think is amazing.”

Her S.M.A.R.T. training continues to inform her practice.  When her colleagues say, “This child has ADHD” she asks, “’Have you tried spinning? Or balancing? Or pencil rolls?  Let’s start with some of those.’  I say to parents, do you ever notice them spinning? And they say ‘yeah.’  And I say, ‘let them, they need it, their bodies are telling them they still need to move.’”   
​She says, “When parents are asking [about a child’s behavior], they know there’s a problem, so it’s a matter of letting them know that there’s a reason why that’s happening.  These behavioral issues might have a basis in something more concrete, and if you can address those things, they might go away or minimize.”
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“I have probably three or four kids with high behavioral needs.  One of my little guys used to have really large emotions and now you wouldn’t really recognize him.  Does he still have moments?  Absolutely, we still have to work on it.  However, he’s really calmed down quite a bit.  His mom said, ‘oh my gosh, he has improved by leaps and bounds.’”
The knowledge Leah has gained through the S.M.A.R.T. training has given her a different perspective on her own children. “I wish I would have had this training before I had kids because I feel like I would have done a better job when my kids were toddlers, and it breaks my heart. As a parent, I would say it’s a life-changing training that teaches you movements that we often want to skip because they are doing it so fast. My oldest went straight from sliding on his belly to minimal amounts of crawling to running, so he missed most of the crawling, and he has struggled with reading and writing.
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​“We are a container society, we are putting our kids in car seats to highchairs to bouncy seats and they are never getting those experiences on the ground, and those experiences are the ones that lead to academic success. We should tell parents ‘Don’t rush them, there are a lot of stages we try to rush through, and quite honestly they need to be on the ground moving.’"

For parents of older children that are having problems academically or behaviorally, Leah says, “There’s a lot of brain-based activities that we can be doing, even at upper levels. My favorite video to show people is The Brain Highway, because there’s always someone who says ‘oh, yeah, I get it!’ when they see it.”
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