Looking for Orton Gillingham Tutors: What I Learned As A Parent Of A Struggling Reader
I was sitting in my minivan outside a strip mall tutoring center last October, holding a crumpled napkin with a tutor’s name scribbled on it, sipping coffee that had gone cold 20 minutes earlier. A week before, our third grade parent-teacher conference had ended with the principal leaning across the table saying, “Leo’s dyslexia markers are clear. He needs Orton Gillingham, and our school only has one reading specialist for 12 classes. You’ll need to find a tutor outside.” I’d never heard of Orton Gillingham before that. I just knew my son came home every day with his reading worksheet crumpled into a ball at the bottom of his backpack, and he said reading was “stupid” so he didn’t want to do it.
I spent the next two weeks scrolling parent Facebook groups, checking tutoring directory websites, and asking every teacher I knew for recommendations. The first tutor I booked was at that strip mall center: she had a 5-star website, all her certifications posted front and center, and pages of parent testimonials raving about her work with dyslexic kids. She charged $120 an hour, which made my stomach drop, but I thought we’d cut back on takeout and weekend trips to make it work. It had to be worth it for the best help, right?
The meet-and-greet went off the rails fast. She sat Leo down at a big linoleum desk, pulled out a stack of letter flashcards, and started quizzing him immediately. Leo hunched over, tucked his hands under the table, mixed up b and d on the third card, and she said, “Wait, that’s wrong. Look at the shape again. Try again.” By the end of 15 minutes, Leo’s eyes were shiny, and he wouldn’t look at either of us. When we got back to the car, he stared out the window and said, “I don’t want to go back there. She thinks I’m dumb.”
I texted our school reading specialist that night, told her what happened, and she gave me another name: Mrs. Henderson, she retired from our district four years ago, got her Orton Gillingham certification back in 2012, tutors out of her sunroom 10 minutes from the elementary school. No website, just a cell phone number. I called her, she said she had an opening after school on Wednesdays, charged $65 an hour, and all materials were included, no extra fees.
Our first visit to her house, there was a rose bush growing over the porch, and a golden retriever napping on the step. Her sunroom had big windows overlooking the backyard, a big wooden table covered in magnetic letters, a tray of fine sand for writing, and stacks of colored plastic blocks sorted by sound. On the corner of the table sat a glass jar of lemon drops. The first thing she asked Leo wasn’t about letters or reading. It was what he liked to do when he wasn’t in school. He immediately launched into a 10-minute monologue about his dinosaur collection, how he was three minifigures short of a full Jurassic World set. She nodded the whole time, then pulled out a thin beginner reader about paleontology from her shelf and said, “Okay, before we do any skill work, let’s find all the dino names in here that have the b and d sounds you’ve been working on.” She built “T-Rex” with magnetic letters, had him tap each sound with his finger, and let him hold the plastic T-Rex he had stuffed in his pocket the whole session. After an hour, he walked out clutching a lemon drop and said, “Can I go back next week?”
That experience taught me a lot I wish I’d known when I started looking for a tutor. First, certification matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. I walked into the search thinking the fanciest, most expensive tutor had to be the best, but that wasn’t true for us. I ended up making a short list of three simple questions I’d ask any tutor before booking a meet, and I still share it with other parents who are starting their search: How much of a typical session uses hands-on, moving or building work versus paper and pencil worksheets? What do you do if a kid gets frustrated and wants to stop halfway through a skill? What do you expect from us at home?
Orton Gillingham is supposed to be multi-sensory, so if a tutor says most sessions are worksheets, that’s a red flag. If they say they assign an hour of homework a night, that’s another red flag. Kids already have enough school work, and the whole point of this is to build confidence, not add more stress. Mrs. Henderson sends home one 5-minute activity a week – last week it was writing sounds in shaving cream on the kitchen counter – that’s it. No extra drills, no mandatory reading logs.
I also learned that cost doesn’t equal quality, and there are more affordable options than the big chain tutoring centers if you know where to look. I didn’t even ask our school district until Mrs. Henderson suggested it, but it turns out they cover 50% of outside tutoring costs for kids with a dyslexia diagnosis on an IEP. That cut our bill in half every month. Many new tutors who just finished their Orton Gillingham training offer lower rates to build their client list, and retired teachers like Mrs. Henderson often charge less because they tutor for the love of the work, not to turn a big profit.
It’s not all perfect. Some weeks, Leo is tired after soccer practice and says he doesn’t want to go to tutoring, and we reschedule if we can. He still mixes up b and d sometimes when he’s writing quickly, and he still prefers playing outside to reading. I don’t know what reading will look like for him in high school, or if he’ll ever get the same joy out of a long novel that I do. But when I started looking for an Orton Gillingham tutor, I thought I needed to find the “best” one, the one that checked every box on a list of credentials and had the shiniest website. What I actually needed was someone who would ask my son about dinosaurs first, and letters second. That’s the thing no parent group post told me upfront: the right tutor isn’t the one that looks good on paper. It’s the one that makes your kid stop hiding their wrong answers.
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