New Beginnings! Episode 1

The Story Behind Vision Reading Academy: From Struggling Reader to Revolutionary Program
 Featuring Krystle and Coach Leah 

Episode Summary

In the very first episode of the podcast, founder Krystle shares the deeply personal story behind the creation of Vision Reading Academy and how her daughter’s reading struggles led to a completely new approach to helping struggling readers.

After years of trying traditional dyslexia interventions with little success, Krystle refused to give up. Through research, collaboration with multiple specialists, and relentless experimentation, she discovered a connection between ocular muscle control, myofascial tension, and reading ability that changed her daughter’s life—and eventually the lives of students around the world.

Joined by Coach Leah, another homeschooling mom whose own son experienced dramatic reading breakthroughs, this episode introduces listeners to the heart, science, and mission behind Vision Reading Academy.

In This Episode

• Krystle’s daughter being diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD 
• Years of frustration using traditional reading interventions 
• Why standard “gold standard” programs weren’t working 
• The emotional toll reading struggles took on their family 
• The turning point that changed everything 
• Working with chiropractors, therapists, educators, and specialists 
• Discovering the role of myofascial tension and ocular muscle control 
• How Krystle’s daughter jumped from a beginning first-grade level to fifth-grade proficiency in just three months 
• Why Vision Reading Academy is different from tutoring or traditional vision therapy 
• The importance of individualized student plans 
• How the program continues evolving through ongoing research 
• An introduction to retained primitive reflex integration 
• What listeners can expect from future podcast episodes 

Key Takeaways

“We’re not just moms—we’re moms trying to help other moms.”

This episode highlights the emotional journey so many parents experience when searching for answers for struggling readers.

Reading struggles aren’t always cognitive.

Krystle explains how many children struggle because of physical barriers involving eye function, muscle tension, and coordination—not intelligence.

Traditional interventions don’t work for every child.

After nearly five years of trying curriculum after curriculum, Krystle realized her daughter needed a completely different approach.

Every student is unique.

Vision Reading Academy creates individualized programs tailored to each child’s specific needs rather than forcing students into a one-size-fits-all system.

The science is always evolving.

The program continues growing through research, collaboration, and new discoveries that improve student outcomes.

Transcript

Leah 0:00

Welcome to the very first episode of our new podcast. We are happy you've stopped by to join us today. I am very happy to introduce Crystal, the founder of Vision Reading Academy, and the regular host of this show. As a dedicated scientist, Crystal has blended her expertise with a passion for education to create an innovative program. Inspired by her daughter's incredible journey, going from struggling with reading to achieving grade level proficiency in just three months, Crystal developed a holistic approach and explores the link between ocular muscle control, its underlying causes, and reading ability. Her transformative methods are empowering people worldwide to overcome reading challenges and unlock their full potential. So thank you, Crystal, for having me on today.

Krystle 0:46

Yes, thank you for being the host today, so that I don't feel awkward talking about myself by myself. All right, so let me introduce you to Leah a little bit. She will have her own podcast episode where we'll interview her and talk about her coaching journey and everything else. So this is Coach Leah Stein. She is a homeschooling mom of three, a talented writer, and now a certified reading specialist with Vision Reading Academy. With eight years as a copywriter and her book, A Boy and His Butterfly to her name, Leah has a gift for storytelling and a passion for supporting families. Her journey with the academy began when her son faced reading challenges, soaring from a kindergarten to a fifth grade reading level in just six months. Leah is dedicated to helping other families overcome similar hurdles and find effective solutions. I'm excited to join her as a co-host for this very first episode.

Leah 1:48

Thank you for having me again. Just you saying my little snippets of my story. I just already tearing up. So that's a disclaimer we should probably talk about. We tended to cry a lot about our journeys. Crystal, why don't you tell us about your journey with your daughter?

Krystle 2:04

Okay, let's make a sign up cry. No, we want to keep it real here. We want to keep it so it's laid back and low-key, and you can listen and follow along and hear our story as we go along. I started Vision Reading Academy after I had worked with my daughter for almost five years. And she got diagnosed dyslexic, ADHD. So I tried the gold standard Orton Gillingham method, the gold standard curriculums for dyslexia, and I got nowhere with her. I got absolutely nowhere. I got her barely at a beginning first grade reading level. It took me working with her for those almost five years, going, okay, I have done everything I can as far as everything that I know that's out there. I did, I don't even remember now. It might have been three or four separate curriculums where I was like, okay, well, maybe it's this curriculum. I'm going to start her back at the kindergarten level because maybe along the way it was there was something that she missed. There was like a key puzzle piece that she missed. And so I needed to go back and I needed to reteach her everything again. And then it would all click. What's the definition of insanity?

Leah 3:15

Over and over and over again, expecting a different result.

Krystle 3:18

Exactly. That's basically where I was at. I finally went, okay, something has to change here. This is not working. I am to the point that I'm going to start making a list of trades for her that she will just pick one of them that I can start teaching her at 10 years old to be able to do so that by the time 18 comes around and she's ready to go out on her own as an adult, she'll have something that she's mastered in order to survive in the world. And I wasn't quite ready to do that. I wasn't quite ready to give up on her because she was brilliant. I could see how brilliant she was. So I knew that it wasn't something that was wrong with who mentally. That's when I was like, okay, I'm going to try different other avenues out there. And I'm going to see if there's something else out there. So I just started talking to different experts. I started talking to a chiropractor, a medical massage therapist, a cranial sycrom therapist, a physical therapist, an energy kinesiologist, a rating professor. I started doing all this type of stuff. I had the reading professor take me under his wing and show me things that he does when he works with struggling readers. So I took that and then grabbed everything else from all the other experts and what they taught me and started experimenting on her. I experimented on my own daughter. It's not like I had to apply for an IRB or anything. I it was just trying different methods with my daughter. She has at this point, what was it going to hurt? I basically threw the entire spaghetti pot at the wall, essentially, and then was hoping that some of the noodles would sit. And it turned out to be incredible for her. Like Leah said, she went from a beginning first grade reading level to reading fifth grade at grade level in three months. That was huge. And it was such an accomplishment for her. It immediately skyrocketed her confidence. And she turned into a completely different kid, a kid that I knew that was in there, a kid that I knew that was my child. She came back out because she had been lost for so many years because she kept looking at all of her peers and she kept looking at her friends, and she kept going, Mom, I am not good enough as them. I'm stupid. And I knew she wasn't. It was beautiful and fantastic, and I loved seeing it. And that's when people started coming to me and going, What did you do? This is incredible. I said, I just did this and this and this and worked with her, and now she's where she's at. And I started going, Can you help my kid? Can you help my kid? And that's where everything kind of snowballed and grew into an actual company that I really never thought would be something that I needed to create. I was out there to help my child, but then I saw how much it helped my child and how much my mama heart was happy because I saw her happy, because she was succeeding and her future was changing. Then that's why I was like, okay, I gotta do this for other kids. So here I am. Yeah.

Leah 6:33

I'm so glad you did because seriously, I'm all tearing up by a goosebumps because it's so true. It's that mama heart, we're just moms trying to help other moms. Because that's literally what we are. We are just moms who care about all those little tender hearts that are out there and broken and sad, and they think they're dumb. The parents think that they're failures for not being able to teach them how to do these things, or that the school system failed them, and it's simply not that. Yes. And you don't know until you know, but once you know, it's amazing.

Krystle 7:05

Yep, exactly. What this program is that I still like that it separates it from all other programs out there, is because we're not just taking any struggling reader. We understand that there are still going to be struggling readers that it just doesn't click for them because maybe they do have a true dyslexia, which is a cognitive ability, right? Those aren't the ones that we are broadening our horizon and we're we're helping those kids. We are specifically helping a certain group of kids, and what they have issues with have to do with that specific issue with the myofascial tension of their face, their head, and their neck, which is then the root cause of that ability for their eyes to be able to be functioning like they're supposed to be functioning. So it goes a little bit deeper than even the vision therapy that's out there. We're not vision therapy, it goes beyond that. We are looking at further down the line about what's going on. And so we're able to help every single student that comes into our program because it's such a niche thing that we're helping, essentially. Right.

Leah 8:23

And what I love about the program, on top of all of that, is that it's always growing. We're always adding new things. We're always saying, Oh, you know what? This is going to be an exercise that'll help. This will be something that will help strengthen that specific muscle. And I think that is a lot too. It's not cut and dry. And every student gets their own individualized plan based on where they're at. We meet the students where they're at. We don't say, okay, well, you fit into this box or this box or this box. I have two brothers, I do one after another. They're on completely different programs because they don't need the same thing.

Krystle 9:00

Yeah, exactly. That's why when all of the coaches that we have in the program now, when they went through the training, the first thing that I said to them was this is a research-based program. It's a program that will always ever be evolving and changing because there's going to be new information out there. I do not believe in the term of the science is settled. I feel like that there is always more information out there. There's always more things that we can learn. So that is something that I take very seriously. And I want to make sure that I am continuing to learn things and the other coaches, they're out there researching too. They're looking for other things too. And we come together and we pal out and we're like, what about this? And what about this exercise? And so it's still evidence-based, right? It's still, there's still that aspect of it. So it's not like we're going, let's try this next and let's do this next, right? There's actual evidence behind it, something that we just barely added into the program, which we'll do another episode on it and talk about it. But we got training in how to test for and how to integrate out retained primitive refluxes. If you haven't ever heard of retained permittive refluxes, go look it up. It is a fascinating topic. It's incredible how amazing our bodies are and what our bodies do to help us grow and what our bodies do to even help protect us. There's all those types of things that we're always looking at to make it so our students are advancing even faster through the program because we're putting more of the puzzle pieces together for them to be able to help them.

Leah 10:40

Yeah, it's definitely awesome. And I think another thing that we need to touch on while we're here is that we're not tutoring, we're not reading tutors. I think that's something that's important to get out there right off the bat is that's not what we do. We're not here to tutor your child. It's more than that. Way more than that.

Krystle 11:00

Absolutely. But I mean, that doesn't say that if your child is struggling, that you shouldn't come and have them assessed. We offer free assessments, and so it's not something that is going to be taking away from your pocketbook. We offer the free assessment and we will tell you. No, they don't have anything that's going on that we usually look for that we're looking to be able to fix the problem with them. So that's one robe that you can then fold off and be like, okay, I've done that. It's not that, it's over. Let's go look at this now, right? At least we'll give you answers. But it's something that we take very seriously. Now, does our program consist of a reading portion to the program? 100%. Because I believe that as we are fixing that myofascial tension, we're getting the eyes to be able to work naturally how they're supposed to be working after getting rid of all of that. We then make sure that their eyes are being trained to meet at that singular gaze point and to do that through reading, because that is a staple of living. You have to know how to read in order to survive in life, right? Whether it's you're in the grocery store, you're looking at package ingredients to reading roadsides on the road as you are writing. That's why we want to make sure that we do have a reading program portion to our program, but we are not, like Leah said, reading tutors. That's not our main job. We don't teach your child to read. We supplement with helping your child to be able to read as the mom or the teacher is the one that is then taking what we're doing with that child and then helping them continue on with their reading journey.

Leah 12:46

I don't know if we have anything else to go over in the initial episode. I think that kind of is a good introduction on what we're gonna be doing. We'll get to know the coaches, get to know us. I think this is a great start to this amazing journey that we're all on together.

Krystle 13:04

I love it. One thing that I wanted to add is give you an overview of kind of what you can expect in some of our other podcast episodes. So we're gonna be doing where we're gonna break down the science in a lot of things. We're gonna be talking about the different methods and scientific stuff that we do throughout our program. We will also be talking about student success stories. So you will be able to hear these stories firsthand. We'll have the coaches be telling the stories. We'll also have parents come on and tell their story as well. It's going to be an emotional, but amazing and fulfilling journey. I hope that you stick around and follow us as we continue on our journey.