Brookwood Christian School has been serving the needs of dyslexic students for 20 years and counting.
By Donna Harris
There’s virtually no obstacle a parent won’t run through, over, or around to provide for their child. This is true for a myriad of issues from healthcare to access to a quality education. For example, one local mother’s feelings of frustration and helplessness led her to create a school that would provide her young daughter — and other students diagnosed with dyslexia — with the educational help she couldn’t find anywhere else.
In 2004, Kim Wigington founded Brookwood Christian School (BCS) in Acworth after her daughter, Kristen, was diagnosed with dyslexia, a specific language-based learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and poor spelling and decoding abilities.
“In 2002, my daughter, Kristen, was 7 years old, in first grade, had an IQ of 135 and couldn’t read,” Kim said. “It didn’t make any sense. Even though I had been a certified teacher, counselor, and administrator for 15 years, I had no idea how to help my own daughter.”
Kristen, now 29 and serving as Brookwood Christian’s director of marketing and advancement, said she “struggled with reading and couldn’t seem to catch up” at the Cobb County private school she was attending. “By second grade, I was still having trouble with even simple words,” she said. “Midway through the school year, I was pulled for testing and diagnosed with dyslexia.”
Because there was no dyslexia school in north Cobb and only one in Cobb County at the time, Kim took matters into her own hands. She resigned from her position and began networking, asking questions, reading books, and studying anything she could find on dyslexia and sensory integration disorder.
“Step by step, I began to build my network,” she said. “I called a friend, a school psychologist whom I had worked with. She told me to call the Georgia chapter of the International Dyslexia Association and ask about a tutor. They led me to Bonnie Cohen-Greenberg. Bonnie connected me with a tutor, an occupational therapist, a developmental pediatrician, and Jean Derosa, a trainer for the Wilson Reading Program. I remember [Kristen’s] tutor, Loretta, asking Kristen if she was sad that there was no school on Labor Day. Kristen, who was 7 at the time, looked up at me and said, ‘Mom, is she being facetious?’ Loretta looked at me and said, ‘Well, her IQ isn’t the problem, is it?’”
All the services Kristen needed was going to cost Kim and her husband, Kevin, $40,000 a year, which they couldn’t afford. “In addition to Kristen going to school, every day we had some sort of therapy for her or training for me,” Kim said. “By Thanksgiving [of] her second-grade year, something had to give.”
Kristen said her mom, who has three degrees in education, “made the difficult decision to pull me out of school and home-school me while seeking the right remediation strategies to support my new diagnosis. This marked the beginning of our journey to find a program that truly addressed my learning needs,” she said.
“By Christmas, I was teaching reading lessons to eight students around my kitchen table,” Kim said, noting she now uses that table, which belonged to her great-grandmother, as her desk in her BCS office. That table, Kristen added, was “the beginning of what eventually grew into our own school.”
“The decision to start our own school happened organically,” Kristen continued. “Once word spread that my mom, who was highly qualified to teach, was home-schooling me, several families from our church reached out, asking if she could help their struggling learners, too. Before we knew it, there was a group of kids gathered around our dining room table, receiving the support they needed.”
Before long, Kim’s home-school classes were outgrowing the kitchen table. And since Kristen’s diagnosis came midyear, she couldn’t be enrolled in a dyslexia school until the next academic year. Additionally, the school wouldn’t allow the daughter Kim and her husband were adopting from Eastern Europe to attend classes there, even though the “dyslexia reading program was perfect for students learning English as a second language,” Kim noted. These circumstances created the “perfect storm” for starting Brookwood.
“It just made sense for the two girls and I to be together in one school,” Kim said. “I also wanted to continue working with my home-school students.”
With a $50,000 personal loan and a few employees, Kim rented a room at a church in August 2004 to run her home-school co-op classes with another teacher. By Thanksgiving, “we were no longer a home-school co-op. We were a fully accredited school with 20 students,” she said.
Three years later, the new nonprofit private school had outgrown that space, and the Wigingtons bought the property at 4728 Wood Street in Acworth and began to construct their “little red schoolhouse,” according to the BCS website.
“Brookwood Christian School is the result of caring professionals asking ourselves how we would ‘do school’ if we could do it however we want,” Kim said. “It makes for a better experience for students and the teachers.”
The school now has 80 students in first through 12th grades — one of only two such schools for dyslexic students in metro Atlanta — as well as 16 teachers, three administrators, two interns and a marketing team, Lower School Administrator Danielle Anderson said.
The school’s mission is to encourage exceptional students in grades 1-12 to work to their very best abilities in a low-stress Christian environment. Teachers understand that traditional learning methods don’t always work for dyslexic students, and they strive to nurture individual learning styles and remediate specific learning deficits to improve students’ quality of life.
Teachers use a variety of techniques to help students cope and learn, including one hour a day of Wilson Reading Program classes that provide structured, multisensory instruction tailored to dyslexic learners’ needs. They also have an hour of reading comprehension and language arts daily.
“We also utilize specialized textbooks designed for their learning styles, along with hands-on activities that make learning more engaging and interactive,” Kristen said. “Additionally, we prioritize outdoor time, recognizing that a change of environment can stimulate focus and improve overall well-being, further supporting our students’ educational journey.”
“We remediate where needed but also push them to excel where they can,” Kim added. “Our methods and materials can help student test scores increase as much as four grade levels in a year.”
During the past 20 years, Brookwood has had roughly 500 students receive help for coping with their dyslexia, Kim said. Kristen added that she believes the school has been “incredibly successful in helping its students.”
“We administer the Woodcock Johnson Master Test at the end of each school year to monitor progress, and, on average, our students raise their reading level by two grades each year,” she said. “This significant achievement reflects the hard work and dedication of both our students and the teachers who support them.”
Lower School Administrator Danielle Anderson, whose son graduated from Brookwood, primarily measures the school’s successes by its graduates’ successes. “It makes our staff proud when we learn our former students are continuing their education,” she said. “Their choices have included KSU [Kennesaw State University], Chatt Tech [Chattahoochee Technical College], Georgia Trade School, mechanical and automotive fields. Some immediately join the workforce after graduation. Often our former students stop by to check in with us. We have alumni-only events that help strengthen friendships that began at Brookwood.”
As a private school, BCS is funded by tuition, grants from foundations, donations from the community, sales of school T-shirts and fundraisers such as the Spring Tea and Auction, Acworth Charm Tour of Homes, and Storybook Golf Cart Extravaganza.
The school also accepts the Georgia Special Needs SB10 Scholarship and the Georgia Tax Credit Scholarship from Apogee Scholars.
Kim and Kristen have definite ideas about what they’d like to see happen in the school’s future. Kim’s goal is to offer a quality education as long as there is a need in the community, while Kristen said her ultimate goal, which “might sound a bit cynical,” is to “run my family business out of business.”
“I’m currently pursuing my master’s degree in moderate learning disabilities and researching how to create curricula that cater to all learners,” she said. “Through my educational research, I’ve discovered that counties don’t have to spend a fortune to adapt their curricula to meet everyone’s needs. I aspire to collaborate with public school systems to implement these changes, ensuring that every student has access to the same high-quality education we provide at Brookwood, and at no cost. Given that many families are facing financial challenges today, I want to work toward a future where, by the time I retire, every student in my community can receive the education they deserve without placing any financial burden on their families.”
Brookwood Christian School
4728 Wood Street
Acworth, GA 30101
678.401.5855
www.brookwoodchristian.com
 in Acworth after her daughter, Kristen, was diagnosed with dyslexia.){kind=link}