Today we’d like to introduce you to Catherine Mitchell.
Hi Catherine, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
This really started about 20 years ago because of my daughter. She was at the end of third grade, and she couldn’t read. We went through all the school interventions and their dyslexia program, but we saw very little progress. I finally had to pay for an outside program myself just to get her some help.
The hardest part was that I was in education, and my own training didn’t help me save her. It made me look around my own classroom and my school, and I realized just how many students were behind in reading. I became determined to find an answer that would work for all students.
I paid for my own training outside of the district and did a deep dive into everything out there like OG, Take Flight, Barton, and the rest. But what I found was that kids were often stuck in these programs for one to three years just to see functional progress. To me, that was just unacceptable. I kept searching until I found a Speech-to-Print approach, which flips the script and gets results much faster. That is how Blossoming Skills got started.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road, and the biggest struggle has actually been fighting market misconceptions. So many parents have been persuaded that Orton-Gillingham is the absolute gold standard for dyslexia. Because everyone has been conditioned to believe that intervention has to be this long, multi-year road, people are actually skeptical when they see fast progress with us.
Many parents are just skeptical of anything different. They’ve been trained to expect a slow grind, so when a Speech-to-Print approach works quickly, they worry it’s too good to be true. The reality that often gets overlooked in the industry is that while kids do make progress in those traditional programs, it is often so slow that it doesn’t consistently close the school gaps.
Proving to skeptical parents that there is a faster, more effective way to fix reading and spelling has been a huge hurdle, but watching these kids actually catch up to grade level makes the uphill battle worth it.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Blossoming Skills Reading Therapy?
At Blossoming Skills Reading Therapy, we provide an intensive reading intervention program. This is definitely not tutoring. The main goal here is to get kids back up to grade level as quickly as possible.
What really sets us apart is how we set families up for success. I provide all the materials, involve the parents so they know exactly how to work with their child, and provide individualized lesson plans for home practice in between our sessions.
The program is 12 weeks long, and we guarantee one grade level of progress. In fact, less than 1% of the students who go through my program don’t meet that mark on time. But if a child is in that 1%, I continue working with them at no additional charge until that goal is met. I stand behind my work with this guarantee because for me, this is deeply personal. I am not satisfied until the goal is reached, and I am completely invested in building a generation of strong readers and giving these kids their confidence back.
Even after the program wraps up, I don’t just walk away. I provide two follow-up visits and a full written plan for the parents so they can keep the momentum going. I want readers to know that if their child is behind, it doesn’t have to be a multi-year process. We can get them caught up quickly.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I don’t look at risk as making reckless gambles. For me, risk is just standing behind what you know works, even when it goes against what everyone else is doing.
When I decided to offer a 12-week grade-level guarantee, it was a big professional risk. In the education world, nobody gives guarantees. If a child doesn’t meet that goal, I keep working with them for free until they do. But I took that risk anyway because I wanted parents to see that I have real skin in the game.
The other big risk has been stepping away from the mainstream programs like Orton-Gillingham or Take Flight. Everyone in the dyslexia world points to those as the only option. But after years in the classroom, I just couldn’t accept that it should take two or three years for a kid to see real progress. When a student is already behind, they don’t have years to waste. Pointing that out definitely gets me some pushback from people who love those programs, but I’ve seen too many kids work incredibly hard for way too long without actually catching up to grade level. For me, the real risk was staying quiet and letting families stay stuck in that slow cycle.
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