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A Brief History of Sound Reading Solutions
By Erica Anderson

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Sound Reading Solutions was founded and is directed by Bruce Howlett. For over a decade, Howlett worked with a member of the National Academy of Science at Cornell University in biochemical and molecular research. In preparation for teaching graduate students, Howlett took science education courses, which led to a teaching position at a school for emotionally-disturbed teens. None of the students read well enough to use high school level texts. Hoping to understand how these students might learn to read Howlett became certified as a special education teacher.

As he studied, Howlett was shocked by the flimsy research foundation underlying reading instruction. After working as a middle school special education teacher, it became apparent to him that students who didn't learn to read in elementary school were treated as second class students. Upon transferring to an elementary school in the Fall of 1997, Howlett was promptly handed 24 third and fourth graders whose reading skills were low level at best—despite instruction in some of the most well-known reading methods in the field.

Nothing in Mr. Howlett's training had prepared him for these students, and when a bout with the flu left him with time away from work, he spent two days reading materials he had gathered from scientific journals, including the Shaywitz papers and Adams' Beginning to Read. The disconnect between research and practice was frightening. Howlett spent the next year reading over 100 papers and developing working relationships with speech-language pathologists (SLPs). The following school year, Howlett shared 18 students with SLP Nancy Williams, who helped him apply methods from the speech-language-hearing field into reading remediation. Howlett and Williams placed their information on a Web site and were flooded with requests and suggestions for new methods. They hand-assembled these materials and gave them away, until the copy machine at Howlett's school broke down and he paid a printer to make the copies. This began Sound Reading Solutions in 1998.

Sound Reading Solutions evolved into a network of SLPs and reading teachers. Currently, Sound Reading Solutions functions as a center for twenty SLPs; reading, ESL and special education teachers; and programmers who create highly effective, easy to use materials that have a measurable impact on the reading abilities of students. Sound Reading Solutions' mission is to provide advanced programs, software and reading practice for literacy development, improvement and intervention that meet the needs of our diverse, multilingual population. Sound Reading programs, readers and software are currently being used by thousands of students in public schools and many home schools throughout the United States and Canada.

For more information about Sound Reading Solutions and their products, visit www.soundreading.com.