Grandmother’s Story: How Tutoring Changed Her Grandson’s Life | Learning Disabilities Help

If you're a grandparent raising a grandchild who is struggling in school, this story will hit home.

In this episode of It’s a Grand Life, we visit the Learning Disabilities Clinic in Oak Park, Michigan to hear a powerful story from a grandmother who fought to get her grandson the help he needed.

After years of struggling with reading and school, everything changed with the right support.

👉 You’ll learn:

How learning disabilities can impact children differently
Why one-on-one tutoring can be life-changing
How the right teacher can unlock confidence and ability
What grandparents and caregivers can do to advocate for their child

This episode also highlights the mission of The Grand Fund, providing real support for grandfamilies across the country.

📌 If you or someone you love is raising a grandchild, you are not alone.

👉 Subscribe for more stories and resources
👉 Join our Facebook group: It’s a Grand Life
👉 Share this video to help another family

#GrandparentsRaisingGrandchildren #LearningDisabilities #DyslexiaSupport #KinshipCare #itsagrandlife 

0:00 Introduction to Grandfamilies
0:30 2.3 Million Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
1:45 Meet the Guests
2:30 Finding the Right Tutor
4:30 Grandmother’s Emotional Story
7:00 First Signs of Progress
9:00 How Tutors Match with Students
11:00 Can Kids Learn Later in Life?
13:00 Reading Challenges & Misconceptions
17:00 Services Offered at the Clinic
20:00 Who They Help (Full Breakdown)
21:30 Final Thoughts + Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:08

Welcome to It's a Grand Life, where our mission is to be a voice for grandfamilies and kinship caregivers everywhere. Did you know that in the United States alone, there are 2.3 million grandparents raising their grandchildren? 2.3 million. It's a Grand Life is committed to making a difference for those kids. That's why we have the podcast, a Facebook group, and the grand fund. The Grand Fund, which is a 501 which was launched in June of 2024, provides financial assistance to grand families, including shelter, food, clothing, and household needs. Grand families are in every neighborhood, in every city, every tribe, and territory nationwide. If this is you or someone you love, we're here for you, and we welcome you to join us on this mission. Our goal is to offer hope and resources to help you. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us wherever you get your podcast and leave a review. You can also join our Facebook group, just search for it under It's a Grand Life. And your reviews, comments, and sharing of our podcasts help us reach others that need assistance. Welcome to another episode of It's a Grand Life. Hello, my name is Craig Nash, and we'd like to welcome you to another It's a Grand Life. And we've got another grand story for you here at It's a Grand Life. We're going to go to the Learning Disabilities Clinic in Oak Park. We're going to talk to a grandma and we're going to talk to the head of the organization as well as our dear friend Lisa Grodsky from Olsa and Pontiac. And ladies, like to welcome you to It's a Grand Life. Thank you so much for joining us. And uh Lisa, can you introduce your wonderful guests there who are with you?

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Sure. To my left and your right, we have Christine Frederick. She's raising a grandchild. And to her left, we have Lynn Masters, who owns and directs the Learning Disabilities Clinic here in Oak Park, Michigan.

SPEAKER_05 2:19

And as before we went on the air today, Lisa, you were telling us a story of how you got connected with Lynn Masters and her wonderful organization. Give us the cliff note version of how that happened. Because Oak Park is not exactly next to Troy, right? I mean, there's a little bit of a distance. So what drove you to Oak Park and the Learning Disabilities Clinic?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

So after going through numerous tutors for one of my own children, we were referred to Learning Disabilities Clinic. The distance, it was a little bit out of the budget, but we decided to try it out. And the very first visit, for the first time in many years of struggling with math and you know, going through numerous tutors, my child told me that the tutor that Learning Disabilities Clinic and Lynn matched the tutor based on the interviewing. She goes through a very intensive process of learning about the student and um matched my child with an amazing tutor who um provided tools to get them through the rest of high school and college math.

SPEAKER_05 3:38

That's absolutely terrific. And and Lynn, how how did you get into this? This this whole tutoring phenomenon.

SPEAKER_02 3:46

I started out as a teacher in 1959. Wow. So I'm I'm a grandmother and uh beyond. Uh I was teaching school in Highland Park, Michigan, and was about to have my third child killed, and decided that I had to do something different that I could not stay in the school district. So my graduate professor suggested that I go into private practice, and I've now been doing this for about 60 years. It was a wonderful way to stay connected to my profession, to do good for children, which is what is important to me, and do it on my own schedule.

SPEAKER_05 4:33

Right, so you could still be a mom, right?

SPEAKER_02 4:34

And still be a mom and do all the things that I had to do in my personal life.

SPEAKER_05 4:40

That that's just a phenomenal story. And Christine Frederick, that you are the committed grandma, wants to make sure your grandchild gets all the support that they need, right? To to function. And uh how and how you found out about um learning disability centers probably from Lisa, right? At Olson?

SPEAKER_04 4:59

Exactly. Yes, I did. And I mean, I had talked to Lisa a couple of times about my grandson struggling and not being able to talk to the school or get him um checked in the school uh for an IEP. Well, finally, one day she called me out of the blue and said, uh, I talked to uh Lynn Masters and they got a scholarship for you. And I'm like, what? And she says, Yeah, you need to get a hold of her. And I so I contacted her and Lynn called me back that night. She asked me a few questions. She says, I know who I'm gonna set up with your your grandson. I will call you back in a little bit. And she called Arlene Zavana, and Arlene got a hold of me, and we set up the day and time and day for me to bring Miles in. And I have to say Miles couldn't read, couldn't spell. I knew he had dyslexia, and I know he has some form of ADHD. But after being with Mrs. Apata, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_05 6:24

Oh, don't be sorry at all.

SPEAKER_04 6:28

He got his first B on his spelling test, and he said third grade.

SPEAKER_03 6:37

He went through first and second grade, not reading, not wanting to read. He came home so pro. And when I started to read a book, he goes, No, grandma, I want to read first. And I was like, What? And the next week he came with an A minus.

SPEAKER_05 7:06

Oh my that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_04 7:08

And then he came with a B minus. And now he's like, I gotta and it's just because of the OO. You know, he gets mixed up, but Arlene is working with him so oh my goodness. She sends things home, have him spell it in the sand, and and different words that he needs to work on. Yeah, and she's just amazing, and so is Lynn.

SPEAKER_05 7:41

Well, Lil Lynn, how how were you able to to connect um Christine's grandson with the right tutor? How is that's gotta be an art? How do you do that?

SPEAKER_02 7:53

It probably is an art because I've been doing this for so long, and I listened to a parent's description of that child, and I know who that will coordinate with and correspond with for success, because our primary thing is for a child to believe that they can learn. And we work with adult children too, who have disabilities and can't get a job, and we work with the state in helping adults as well as children. But the primary thing, you know, sometimes your adult children are still at home because they can't get into the world. But the main thing is that we want children to believe that they are strong and smart and capable and a good formal learner, and that only happens when they work with a teacher who believes that, so that the child can believe it. If adults said that to me, which most teachers just don't for some reason. Right. Uh if adults thinks that I can do this, I can do it. And no matter how many times your mother or your grandmother or anybody tells you you you can do this, you are smart, you don't believe it until you can do it for yourself and see it. One of our mission statements is competence brings confidence. You have to see it for yourself. Amen.

SPEAKER_05 9:24

So your uh tutors are part psychologists as well as part tutors.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Well, we have a complete staff. We have an OT, we have a PT, we have psychologists, speech and language pathologists, and teachers, and all of them are at a master's or PhD level. So they're highly trained, highly skilled, but they really for some reason would prefer to be in a clinical setting. Not everybody wants to teach in a classroom. Right. And I have people who have been with me for 30 years, they've never been in a classroom, they only want to be in a clinical setting one-on-one. And we don't do any group instruction, we do only one-on-one. All the attention has to be on that child, not shared.

SPEAKER_05 10:08

That's terrific. And and uh but what uh we were we were talking about Miles earlier, right? And his uh his his need to to be able to read, that's absolutely critical to life's success, right? Just because it isn't there a uh, and you probably know this, Lynn, isn't there a statistic that if you can't read by third grade or fourth grade, I forget the grade level, that that uh there is a uh um a probability that that success is not going to be in your future as far as um career success and other things. In fact, I heard with uh uh a statistic the other day about children in the inner city if they're not reading at a certain level. That that's almost like a a pathway to uh to incarceration and and awful things. But by but have you heard those statistics or I have and they're mostly political.

SPEAKER_02 11:01

When Governor Snyder, I believe, was in office, he or it might have been Governor Angler, he set the the the uh made the statement that if you don't read by third grade, you aren't going to be able to succeed in life, just as you reported.

SPEAKER_05 11:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

However, I have adults who have never read and they learn to read. Because not everybody processes information the same way, and the skilled teacher knows how to figure out the way that particular individual learns. That's our job. So you can't set really an arbitrary number or an arbitrary grade. Sadly, the state of Michigan's children is about 48th out of 50 states in the United States. Only at the 48th level of all 50 states when you test the children on a national reading test. So it's very important to understand how children process. You know, the textbooks that teach reading and other subjects are set up with a script for the teacher, and that's the way the publisher wants the material to be taught. But what if you're a child who doesn't learn in that style and you don't relate to that way that it's set up by the publisher? You have to have somebody who knows how to teach you a different way. I have had autistic teachers who are marvelous, and they students will say to me, if you don't know how to do this math, he can teach you a completely different way. And if that you if you still don't know how to do it, he has 10 or 20 different ways of presenting the material to you so you can learn it, which is one of the advantages of having an autistic teacher, because um that's okay. But um they can see the world in so many different ways when they're at the upper level of the spectrum. So I never hesitate to hire an intelligent, skilled autistic teacher because they bring a quality to the to the teaching situation that nobody else seems to have. But that's my answer to you. I don't think that there is a grade.

SPEAKER_05 13:20

I I love that. And uh I I I think it's it's humorous in today's culture, kinda, that we've made we make a statement like that, a political statement. We need to keep politics out of that and just focus on how do we help our kids to read and write and and know this wonderful math.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

And well, there was something called the third grade law that was that was terminated when the most recent governor took office, Governor uh Whitmer. The third grade law was passed by the state legislature to say that if you are not reading by grade three, you cannot go to grade four. And that might keep you in grade three for the rest of your life, frankly, if you don't have a teacher that knows how to get you beyond that. Very discouraging to a child as well. It's very terrifying to a child, and it's very frightening to a parent to think that your child may never learn to read past third grade because they have a disability.

SPEAKER_04 14:17

I have a question. You are a completely different tutoring system. What made you get into children with disabilities, unlike all the other? Because I paid for that's what broke us. Paying for it, it was $550 because I had Miles going twice a week. This is how bad I wanted him to learn to read and math. Okay. And the he he didn't even learn. I mean, he did not want to read with you. You got you work with disabilities. You're the only center I know in in the area that works with disabilities. So when I told you Miles writes backwards, reads backwards, you knew exactly who to set him up with.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

What made you get into children with disabilities? I was teaching in Highland Park, Michigan. And I started teaching when I was 19 years old. I finished college when I was 19. And I noticed in my classroom that there were certain children who appeared to have I mean, we didn't know a lot. This is 1999. And I could I figured out that that these were smart children in very many different ways. All of us have talent, we just don't always discover it. All all of us, no matter how smart we are, have an area that we don't learn very well. So when I looked at these kids and I saw what was going on with certain children, I pulled them together. I must have had five reading groups in my classroom, and I pulled them together and I listened to how they were struggling and figured out what they had to do. Now, I had my master's degree, but I had more experience working with children than working with the professors in textbooks. Right. And because I was succeeding with the children that were most difficult to be in their behavior, in their learning, in their success, my principal came to me and he said, if I give you a smaller classload, will you take all the kids that are not working well and not learning? Well, I thought that would be a great idea. And the other teachers in that grade said, Yes, give her all the pills. And we'll take a more class, more students. Let her have them. And I love doing that. It was wonderful, and I did it for eight years. That's what brought you to work. And that's what brought me to have this ability to figure it out, know what to do next, and tell the teachers how to begin. And then I have such wonderful teachers that they were able to take it to the next step. We need big people like you.

SPEAKER_05 17:08

I want to find out for our audience because there's a lot of folks listening, and we do talk to folks with uh kids on the spectrum all the time. You know, we do uh interview various folks that are struggling with that. So I want our audience to really understand what all the services you provide at the Learning Disabilities Clinic, and now I understand why people drive to the clinic because uh of your approach. And I think it's it's it's absolutely amazing.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

But what it's funny that you say that because I get children coming here from Canada. In Canada, if you have a child who isn't successful, they make you, the siblings, the grandparents, go to mental health facilities, which are if you live in Windsor, you have to go all the way to London in order to get those services. And they won't let you get any special help until the whole family constellation is in therapy. Oh wow. Isn't that something? So they come here and they don't let them know that they have a child with special needs.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

And just for clarity, London, Ontario, not London, England.

SPEAKER_05 18:16

That'd be an awful commute to get your weekly business.

SPEAKER_04 18:22

I heard it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_05 18:24

So tell us a little bit the the the specific um issues that you folks treat at the Learning Disability Center. What what would those be?

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Okay, that would be behavioral issues like emotional impairments, acting out. Um we receive children from schools where you know the law said it has to be the least restrictive environment, which would be a classroom. But if they can't function in a classroom, they have to go to a learning resource room. If they can't function there, they may go to a special uh program that is just for that particular problem. If they can't function there, they come to me because it's one-on-one, and that is the most restrictive program. So we work with children with emotional problems, learning disabilities, cognitive impairments, which we used to call mental retardation, which we would never say today except I just did. Um physical impairments, occupational uh uh therapy, we have that kind of uh service here. So it's anybody who is not learning in a regular uh expected manner. We every we have children who have cerebral palsy, who have seizures. Um we are on a first floor, so there are no stairs to climb. We're close to the door if that's necessary. And uh sickle cell anemia, different kinds of um of uh physical problems, wheelchair bound, um anything that you can think of that might interfere with the child's learning.

SPEAKER_05 20:00

That's absolutely great to know, and I'm thank you for listing that all out because I think anyone listening to this broadcast is gonna want to know if their child fits into that, and you just articulated it absolutely perfectly. What is the average amount of time that a a student uh tutors with uh your uh tutoring team?

SPEAKER_02 20:18

Well, I don't want to see a child less than once a week for an hour.

SPEAKER_05 20:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 20:24

Because the more that we see that child, the more we can do to help them. They need to have uh reteaching, they have to have reinforcement teaching. They have to sometimes you see them and the very next time they come, they've forgotten everything. And we have to reinforce it because that will make it part of their thinking system. Uh some children, particularly if they're referred by the school, will come four days a week, maybe four hours a day, all the way to one time a week. So if the school district is paying for it and if the parents sue the school district because the child is not receiving fate, which is free and appropriate education, then they can come here as an alternative school because we have been uh uh certified as an alternative school. We get the same uh certifications that the schools throughout the country get. And we I think we are the only education clinic that has that certification.

SPEAKER_05 21:29

Well, for 20 years I was in the the rehab world, the physical therapy had a network of physical therapy clinics in and around Oakland County, and but you have all that under one roof. You've got the the the therapeutic professionals, you've got the learning professionals, and uh it's it's absolutely amazing the uh uh the the depth and the width of the services that you provide. And I I'm just ecstatic to know about the uh learning disabilities clinic. And uh when the our podcast airs at the bottom of the screen, you see that little black area there, that'll have. Your logo and the information to get in contact with you. But uh I just want to thank you all for joining us today on It's a Grand Life, and I want to say to all of the folks watching from home, this is why you support It's a Grand Life. Uh, you didn't know that we were helping folks with tutoring. We've this is the first time I believe we've done that, and you understand why we do it because this is such a great center. We also help folks with car repairs and housing and school supplies, and we've even gotten appliances for folks and other things. But we support grandparents who are raising their their grandkids. And Christine Frederick, you are just a great example of a grandma who would advocate for their grandson. That's why we're here. And uh so we are looking forward to more happy stories about what's going on at the Learning Disabilities Center. Lisa, thank you so much for introducing us to Lynn and this outstanding program. I, you know, we probably would not have found you, you know, get in in Oak Park if you hadn't shined a light on this outstanding clinic. But uh, if you're at home and you've got a child who's wrestling with learning disabilities, you need to reach out to the learn to Lynn Masters at the Learning Disabilities Clinic because they're making a huge difference right here in Oakland County, Michigan. So thank you so much for being our guest today, and we look forward to having you on again so we can hear the latest new things that are happening in the tutoring world. But uh, thanks so much, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you for joining us today for It's a Grand Life. It's a Grand Life provides vital content, regulatory updates, and subject matter experts that are committed to supporting the 2.4 million kids and their caregivers from every neighborhood, every city, every tribe and territory nationwide. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcast and leave a review. Every new subscriber and review helps us reach others that need assistance. As caregivers, we are united in purpose. We are driven by hope while providing strength for today and hope for tomorrow. We are truly making a difference in while living the grand life. If you have a suggestion for a future episode, please reach out to us. But we'll see you next time for another It's a Grand Life. Thank you for joining us.