MORRIS – Amy Brummel has spent her life turning her love of reading into a passion project, assisting children from Central and Northern Illinois.

Brummel has her doctorate in Speech- Language Pathology, she has spent years studying how language and literacy are interrelated and the reading struggles that result when there is a disruption in the language and literacy network.

A speech-language pathologist can prevent, assess, diagnose and treat speech language, social communication, and sometimes swallowing disorders, in children and adults in a variety of ways.

Brummel specializes in literacy with most of her cases involving reading disabilities.

She begins with a two to five hour diagnostic evaluation to determine where the child may be delayed. This typically occurs after the parents have been notified by the school that their child has decreased reading fluency.

“Decreased reading fluency is a sign that there is something going on,” Brummel said. “You cannot treat reading fluency, but you can find out what is causing it.”

The evaluation maps out where a child may be struggling, such as with vocabulary, difficulty with language comprehension, or pragmatics, the social use of language.

“Sometimes children struggle with the social use of language and that affects their reading ability,” Brummel said. “If you can’t tell a story, you can’t understand a story when it is written.”

Brummel looks at all of the pieces that could potentially be affecting a child’s ability to read and she looks at their writing to find out which area has a glitch and what causes it. In most cases, she said, it is neurological.

Her current wait time is approximately 18 months, but if the child is significantly delayed she will attempt to get the child in sooner.

“If it is a student who is really struggling and very low and they have plateaued and nothing anyone has done has helped them, I will pick them up sooner, because time is critical with literacy,” Brummel said.

“It is a building block,” she said. “The longer you wait the more behind you get. Research shows that if you don’t catch up my second grade, you are unlikely to catch up before high school.”

Brummel said she works on “closing the gap” with each child.

“The kids who are not reading in third grade are way more likely to drop out of high school, and if you look at our prison system, 75% of our prisoners cannot read,” Brummel said.

Brummel plans to partner with the Hyde Park School this summer to bring a day camp to Morris at the Wesley Center. Hyde Park is a full day, six-week program offering specialized educational curriculum to children 6 to 15 in intensive math and language skills. Brummel is currently training two teachers from Morris and one from Plano for the pro.

“If you teach a child to read, to make more options available to them in the future,” Brummel said. It’s an escape and its a vacation. You will never be bored, and what a gift it is to never be bored.”