ATLANTA SPEECH SCHOOL OVERVIEW
The Atlanta Speech School has evolved over its 85 years to become the nation's most comprehensive center for language and literacy. Through our four academic programs, the School serves 400 students. Our Wardlaw School serves 190 students K-6th grade who have dyslexia, and is our largest academic program. Our three preschools serve different populations that come together in shared lessons and enrichment, and 1,000 individuals of all ages are supported through our clinical programs. Together with our Rollins Center for Language & Literacy, we share a single mission: to help each person reach their full potential through language and literacy.
Throughout its history, the School has never turned away any child or family because of a lack of financial means. The School's Rollins Center for Language & Literacy, founded in 2014, seeks to extend the social justice of literacy to children far beyond our physical campus, to every child.
We endorse Dr. Gholdy Muhammad and Dr. Maryanne Wolf's definitions of deep literacy or deep reading and are driven to this pursuit, well beyond society's widely accepted standard of "reading proficiency." In Wolf's book Reader, Come Home , she describes deep reading as a goal beyond decoding, reading fluency and good literal comprehension to one of a deeper, more analytic brain - a brain that thinks critically and takes the perspective of others while feeling empathy for their plight. A deep reading brain demonstrates personal reflection as it imagines a better choice, a better idea or a better world. Muhammad extends this philosophy, in Cultivating Genius, describing reading and writing as "transformational acts to improve self and society" and essential for children being able to "acknowledge, name, and interrogate injustices in an effort to transform the world."
Our Rollins Center provides professional development, coaching and training for all the adults in a child's life, perinatal through literacy. In person, Rollins supports educators and community leaders, provides coaching, models literacy practices and leads workshops. Online, through their FREE Cox Campus adult learning community, Rollins offers courses, community and resources to scale the work across the globe, to ensure educators and others have the expertise and agency to deliver research-backed, structured-literacy-based instruction, so that every child has the opportunity to decide their own future. The Rollins Center works in partnership with more than 100 public and private agencies and philanthropies to break the cycle of illiteracy for children whose families have experienced generational denied access to educational opportunity.