Giving Back For Education

A Winnipeg family is taking its Education Property Tax Rebate and giving it back to the city’s education system. But maybe not in the way you would guess.

Alexis and Daniel Kanu donated the entire sum of their rebate (more than $1,000) to the Learning Disabilities Association of Manitoba, after seeing how the organization is helping dyslexic readers. Readers like their daughter, Imogen (Immi), who is seven years old and has been receiving tutoring through LDAM’s Barton Reading Program.

“This was money that is supposed to go into the provincial education system, so we just felt like it was important to put it back into community-focused education resources,” Alexis says. “With Immi being a dyslexic reader, she’s been getting tutoring through LDAM and that’s a critical evidence-based reading instruction program that is missing from the provincial education system.

“It needs to be more accessible, it needs to be more available. Dyslexic readers are one in five people, and we want to help bring that service that LDAM is providing to more people.”

Immi was in Kindergarten when the COVID-19 pandemic took off, and once she was able to return to school, her parents noticed that she appeared to be struggling with her reading.

“We started looking into it and what could be happening, trying to find supports or assessments and it was actually all pretty confusing,” Daniel says. “It almost seemed like there was almost no place to go. But we had some supportive teachers, so we worked with them and were eventually able to get an assessment for Immi.

“I guess the one thing that struck me is just the amount of effort and cost that we had to put into just confirming the challenge that we had, so that she can get the support she needs, so that she can be a reader and participate in reading and writing at school.

“That same burden is put on the other 20% of people who struggle, and if you don’t have the economic means or connections or family members helping you out, well you might just struggle and be thought of as a bad student and that would be the end of your story, right? So that’s something that I really appreciate about LDAM; access is a big part of what I’ve seen happen there, so I really appreciate that.”

Although Immi has been getting the support she needs through both her school and LDAM, it’s not lost on her parents that there is a lot of room for improvement within the province’s education system when it comes to helping students with learning disabilities.

“It took being a squeaky wheel within the school system, but we have been able to access support from excellent reading clinicians who are using evidence-based reading instruction,” Alexis says. “But that is under resourced, you know; there’s one reading clinician in our whole school division. The divisional reading instruction isn’t based on evidence about how dyslexic readers learn to read. There’s so much misunderstanding about what dyslexia is; people think you see things backwards or you can never learn to read and that’s not true.

“We had to explain what dyslexia was to the school. You have to invest so much in just educating yourself to be an advocate for these resources. It was actually the reading clinician that we’re working with at the school who mentioned LDAM to us, and we were just overjoyed to find a resource like this in the community that was providing this kind of accessible tutoring.”

Immi’s journey with dyslexia has even helped Daniel come to the realization that, though he doesn’t have official diagnosis himself, he is almost certainly dyslexic as well.

“We were reading about it and a lot of what was describing adults with dyslexia was describing me,” Daniel says, reflecting on his own struggles in school. “You just kind of assume that it happens to everybody. Those kinds of struggles were just what everyone was experiencing, so you just kind of suffer in silence because why would you think that you’re different?”

Today, Immi is enjoying her Summer break; painting and listening to some of her favourite podcasts like Greeking Out, Story Pirates, and Stoopkids Stories. When she grows up, she wants to be an artist and a veterinarian.

“I’ve never been worried about Immi because she can fight for herself,” Daniel says. “But she also has the support of her family here, our extended family as well, we’re here for her and that’s good.

“But I just think of Immi in another situation, and I just hope that that person can get the support they need as well.”