As soon as you schedule your first sessions, our staff moves into action. With your permission, we contact the individual who referred your child to us. This is not a necessary step, but sometimes helpful in fully understanding your child's situation.
The tutor assigned to your son or daughter meets with our senior staff to review the information you provided and discuss our plan of action. After a few sessions, we will have another team meeting, to make sure things are going as planned. At this time, we will also schedule a parent meeting to review progress to date.

The word "team" pops up in a lot of what we do at The Reading Connection. From the initial phone call to continuing meetings of the staff with our full-time psychologist, every aspect of our services are approached from a team perspective. We hold weekly meetings during which our instructors give a brief run-down of how things are going with each student. This meeting often leads to additional team meetings and/or parent conferences. Our approach is designed to bring in all of our collective resources to make sure we are doing everything we can for every student.

In the first week or two of getting to know your student, we ask that you bring in documents such as report cards, test results and psychoeducational reports for your child’s tutor and our staff psychologist to review. Along with the information you give us during the intake process, these materials will help us to tailor our sessions more specifically to your child’s needs. If you have recent, relevant test results, this is usually sufficient for development of a plan of instruction. After we have had the chance to review these materials, anything that is not a copy will, of course, be returned to you.

If your child has not been tested previously, or not in recent years, we provide three levels of testing: Psychoeducational, Reading Evaluation, and Baseline Evaluations. Psychoeducational evaluations are comprehensive assessments of intellectual, academic and social-emotional factors that affect learning and school performance. Reading Evaluations are more specific to reading, spelling, writing and language comprehension skills. A Baseline Evaluation is sometimes administered by the student’s tutor to discover what your son or daughter’s strengths and weaknesses are and how we can most effectively help. The Reading Connection’s full-time, licensed psychologist, Thomas Jennings, MS, is available to conduct Psychoeducational and Reading Evaluations. He continues to lend his expertise during the tutoring process, providing support and recommendations to our tutors as they work individually with your son or daughter.

After we have seen your child several times, we will schedule a parent meeting to review the progress of tutoring to date, discuss our plan for the future, and address any of your concerns. If you have any questions at any time, we are always available for a phone discussion or an earlier meeting. Please call us if anything comes up that we can help with.

In general, The Reading Connection's sessions are 50 minutes long. However, there are cases where it is more convenient or better for the student to have a double session (1:40).

The answer to this question will of course depend on your child's individual needs, and any timetable, such as an upcoming SAT or SSAT test date. We have many students who come once a week, and have had several come every day for remedial work. In general, however, we usually will try to schedule our new students twice a week to get things started and then reassess whether more or fewer sesssions would make more sense. This would be one of the topics covered in the second team meeting.

As of this update, sessions in one of our offices are $50 per session. If we meet with a student at school, or home, the cost ranges from $60 to $75 per session depending on distance and schedule. Payment is due at the time of each session. If you choose to prepay for 50 sessions, you receive a 10% discount.

Schedules permitting, a tutor will travel to your home to meet with a student. These sessions are charged at a higher rate.

Schedules permitting, and with the permission of your school's administrator, a tutor will meet with your child at school. We enjoy positive relationships with several area schools and are often able to work out this convenient option.

This is something that has rarely come up in our experience, but also something that we pay attention to. The intake process includes matching strengths of the tutor with a student's needs, interests, and any other factors we learn of from speaking with you about your student. Our system is very successful, but we understand that it cannot be perfect, and if you ever have a concern, we will gladly address it.

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