The Lakes & Bridges Charter School in Easley is the only one of its kind in the state of South Carolina. The school was founded by a group of retired teachers and concerned parents back in 2015 with one goal: helping children with dyslexia/severe learning difficulty get the tools they need. Originally starting with grades one through five, Lakes & Bridges has expanded over the past three years to include sixth and seventh grade and has 175 students. About 60 more are on a waiting list to get in.
At the helm of Lakes & Bridges is principal Heidi Bishop, an educator with more than 30 years of experience working with dyslexic and special needs children.
“We are the first charter school in South Carolina to offer free and appropriate education for children with dyslexia [or] severe learning difficulty,” Bishop says. “We are one of five in the entire country that is a charter school offering a free and appropriate education for children with dyslexia.”
The main pillar of Lakes & Bridges’ approach, and perhaps the reason they have such a long waiting list, is that they use the Orton-Gillingham method, a multi-sensory phonics technique for remedial reading instruction developed in the early 20th century.
“Our teachers are all trained in the Orton-Gillingham approach, which is the premier approach for teaching children with dyslexia with the sole purpose of being able to work effectively with a child with dyslexia because they require hands-on multi-sensory curricula and experiences,” she says.
Bishop says the multi-sensory approach works because children with dyslexia/severe learning difficulty often use one sense to compensate for another.
“For children with dyslexia, they may have auditory difficulties,” she says. “So by seeing and feeling, it helps compensate for those auditory weaknesses. Or maybe the child is fine auditorily but hitting those other modalities can compensate for weak visual memory or the weak kinesthetic memory. So by teaching a child in that multi-sensory fashion simultaneously, you’re hitting all the modalities that are strong for them and weak for them.”
Bishop says that the charter school setup allows Lakes & Bridges some advantages that help them better educate their students.
“A charter is sort of like a hybrid of public and private schools,” she says. “We have to follow all the state public school standards. But we have all the autonomy to do what we need to do for children here, like the private schools. We are not dictated to by our authorizer, our school district; they don’t dictate to us that this is the curriculum you must use. So we have a lot of our teachers who do come from public school and take huge pay cuts, but they come here because they want that autonomy.”
