“As a school principal, I work closely with teachers and know good instruction when I see it. Ms. Tonya does not provide “good” instruction – she provides amazing instruction in a meaningful and caring way. Even though I have been in education for years, I am constantly amazed by Ms. Tonya’s instructional methods, expertise, and effect on my daughter. This, combined with her relationship-focused approach, has made Ms.Tonya one of the best teachers I have ever seen. We found Ms.Tonya toward the end of my daughter’s 1st grade year. At that time, she was reading well below grade level, only at mid-Kinder level, and about to start 2nd grade. After a year with Ms. Tonya, her reading grew to an early 2nd-grade level. As a former special education teacher, I knew the importance of closing my daughter’s reading gap early before it became too big. For a struggling student to reach grade level, their yearly progress has to exceed the year’s average expected growth. Having a student make more than a year’s growth in school is very difficult – even with good attendance and a long literacy block. In contrast, Ms. Tonya’s approach was so effective that my daughter made about a year and a half of reading growth by seeing Ms. Tonya only twice a week for 90 minutes”. Thank you, Ms. Tonya!

– Robert Suglia, Ph.D.

“Miss Tonya is a great tutor because she is very nice. She’s very positive. She is very very very very nice. She helped me with reading by printing words that I would read and also she helped me learn how to read a full book by printing little mini books for me to read. I’m glad she helped me because she made it really fun. And she is the nicest person I’ve ever met.”

– James, six years old

“I wish you could have seen Bryson’s smile when I told him he gets to see you tonight.”

– Bryson’s Mom

“Tonya has been an absolute game changer for our third-grade dyslexic daughter and our family! We were fortunate enough to find Tonya six months after learning that our daughter’s reading delays were not just from covid schooling disruptions. Those months were tough–I was trying to figure out how to give our daughter the help she needed, and nothing was really sinking in, so I felt overwhelmed and I think our daughter felt a bit lost, especially with all of the different strategies I was trying. We worked with other tutors, but they did not specialize in dyslexia and it seemed like more of the same teaching that wasn’t resonating at school. Honestly, our daughter’s first session with Tonya felt like such a relief, like we had finally found someone who understood and who knew how to teach in a way that made sense to our daughter. Tonya is unfailingly positive, supportive, and creative, and has developed a really tailored strategy to build our daughter’s literacy skills. We are so excited by her growth; at the beginning of this school year she was reading very laboriously and sounding out the sounds in each word, and as we approach the end of this year she is reading much more fluently, often reading entire sentences without stopping to pause, tackling multisyllabic words with confidence, and applying rules and tricks to all of her spelling, which has also significantly improved . Tonya is incredibly encouraging and open about her own dyslexia, and it’s really inspired our daughter and made her confident about her learning differences–this week our daughter’s special education teacher at school told us that she led her reading group in a chant, “Dyslexia is our superpower!” We cannot recommend Tonya enough, she is an awesome human, a passionate teacher, and an incredible ally!

– Katie Smith