OUR MEMBERS

Experts in Science of Reading and Science of Learning

Dr. Rachel Currie-Rubin

PARTNER

Co-owner and Educational Director at Learning Solutions, she has worked in education for over 12 years as a reading teacher, learning specialist, and educational assessment specialist. She has worked at the Williston Northampton School, CAST, the Carroll School, and Boston Children's Hospital. Her doctorate in Language and Literacy is from Harvard University.

Richard McManus

PARTNER

Director of the Fluency Factory, a learning center in Cohasset, Massachusetts, for the past 20 years. He has developed instructional processes for students from pre-kindergarten through pre-college with needs ranging from dyslexia to SAT and ACT preparation. He is an active member of the Precision Teaching community, and his major interest is creating solutions for reading issues at every level.

Dr. Will H. Burrow

BOARD MEMBER

Administrator in public and private residential programs that served persons with severe cognitive and physical disabilities. For 15 years he was a Director of Special Education in a small school district in Maine, where he radically changed the quality of reading services. He now provides consultation to schools and parents. He teaches core reading skills in a K-5 elementary school that serves a highly diverse population in Portland, Me.

A compassionate dynamic educator, Kate has taught second graders for 14 years at the Main Street School, in Exeter, New Hampshire. With a Master of Education from University of New Hampshire, McCaffery- Pomerleau uses Project Based Learning, to help her students soar as they advocate for change within their community. When they settle upon a compelling issue, they develop an action plan to convince community stakeholders to consider their proposals. Groups of students have worked on humanitarian and environmental issues. As a result, she was recognized by the New England Aquarium for her work with young conservationists and by the Exeter Community Racial Unity Team for her students' work on diversity. As a member of the administration team of Global Educators Collective, a Facebook group, she brings the world to her classroom as her students collaborate virtually with other students across the globe and throughout the United States.

Kathleen

McCaffery-Pomerleau

BOARD MEMBER

Erica Meltzer

BOARD MEMBER

Founder of The Critical Reader and the author of a popular series of grammar and reading test-preparation guides, Erica Meltzer spent more than a decade working as a private English tutor. She developed an interest in reading problems after observing the seemingly inexplicable difficulty many of her high-achieving SAT and ACT students experienced when reading unfamiliar words and texts. What began as a series of puzzling observations in 2008 became a decade-long quest to understand how reading is taught in American schools, why it so often goes wrong, and what can be done to fix it.

Ben Tobin

BOARD MEMBER

Filmmaker and licensed special education teacher from Western Massachusetts, Ben is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. Tobin returned to Massachusetts to make documentaries about various artists living and working in the Hilltown region of the state. Ben attended the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema in Brooklyn, NY, where he majored in cinematography. A member of decoding dyslexia, most recently Ben has turned his documentary lens on the fight for a dyslexia law in Massachusetts, documenting the stories of struggling readers, and using the medium to spread awareness about what good reading instruction looks like.

Jean Tucker

BOARD MEMBER

A licensed Speech and Language Pathologist, Jean earned a master’s degree in Language and Literacy at Harvard University Graduate School of Education and completed the Certification Track at Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions. She is also certified in the cognitive skills curricula known as Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment and its corollary assessment program. She trained in the Orton-Gillingham program at the Carroll School and the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) program. Jean became involved in written-language research, instruction, and training after having observed the language skills: of low-income students when she worked in the Office of Economic Opportunity program, Job Corps; of juvenile delinquents as a State of Rhode Island probation officer; of emotionally handicapped and autistic students in a residential setting; and then of two of three of her own children. The similarities of the language difficulties among all these children were stunning.