Stowell Learning Center

Stowell is the best place for your kids who have learning difficulties or, dyslexia, ADD or ADHD. My grandaughter has been at the Irvine center for 6 months and has increased her ability to read dramatically. She is in the 3^rd grade and was at K level of reading. With the great counselors and work at Stowell she is now almost to grade level. She loves to read now and cannot get enough. She is a hard worker and has a great attitude and it is showing at Stowell and in her regular classroom. The Stowell team is so tuned into what your child needs and focuses on this after a great evaluation. More than normal schools do. They work with young kids to adults which makes it a wonderful place for anyone with reading or learning issues. I understand they also work with speech problems as well. Thank you Jill Stowell for this center that can help so many who need it. Hats off +++++!!

I cannot say enough good things about Stowell Learning Center in Irvine. In short, Jill Stowell and her team get to the root issues causing learning difficulties. Many of us have had our kids assessed. In our case we had a full speech therapy assessment done with follow up reviews over a 3 yr period and a full psych/​educational assessment. But the tricky part is «What now?» Can the deficits be treated or should our daughter go through life compensating for these deficits. She struggled and we struggled with her.
I’m writing as a mother of a soon to be 10 year old 4^th grader who in broad terms has a language based learning disorder. In specific terms, she struggles with working memory, executive functioning, a slower cognitive processing speed etc. She really struggled with schoolwork and has had to put in 150% effort, often doing homework for 1.5 hours. She wonders why she is «so slow, I can’t get it, why she can’t remember facts and that other kids get to play but not her». On top of that, we were living in Shanghai where everything was competitive and stressful.
We moved to Irvine last year and was looking for what services would best address her struggles. I was NOT convinced that she needed to be in speech therapy for the rest of her life. Though I was grateful for the intervention we received in Shanghai in speech therapy, the pace of her improvement did not match the increasing demands of each academic year. I was blessed to have been introduced to Stowell Learning Center through a contact. My daughter was assessed in September 2013. The assessment painted an accurate picture of what I had been observing at home and gave me more insight as to «Why“she was struggling so much. One of the KEY areas was that her auditory processing capacity was 4 years behind her peers. No one told me this before :-)
She was then put on a program; a combination of listening/​comprehension, reading, sound therapy and maths concepts. The sessions are NOT tutoring. ie she does not do homework there. Her sessions of listening and repeating the sounds, sentences, differentiating/​discriminating sounds and words etc are all targeting the areas of deficits. The programs are not one size fits all. They are tailored to the child’s needs.
The Irvine staff are professional yet caring. Opening lines of communication to the teachers and advocate for the children’s needs. They are incredibly supportive and approachable.
So, it’s our 5^th month of going 3 afternoons a week. Yes, it is time consuming. But well worth it. What do I see in our daughter? I am seeing a transformation in her. She is more comfortable in her own skin. Her confidence has grown. She now knows that she is not stupid, as her test scores are showing that she is going from a C student in some subjects to a B+ and A-​. We don’t put a lot of emphasis on scores per se. As long as she does her best, we are happy. But test scores are showing that she is not only learning, she is retaining the information and can reproduce what she knows. She understands that she learns differently. When we started at Stowell, in her reading and comprehension tests each week, she was getting ⁹⁄₂₀. 2 months into Stowell, she was getting 14−15÷20. 5 months in, she is now getting anywhere between 18−20÷20. She is understanding the material in its context more and more. She will always have to work hard but now she is seeing the rewards of her hard work. Rather than just constantly working hard. I need to say too that she goes to a great school that accommodates for her learning style, provides the support she needs and there is good partnership happening between Stowell, the school and home. We are each doing our part in supporting and training her.
Cost? It’s costly but again, worth every cent. We have made some lifestyle choices to give her the opportunity to learn and grow at Stowell. We see it as a necessary investment in her life.
I have seen the effectiveness of the training she is receiving at Stowell Learning Center and the changes in our daughter. I know there are other kids and families who struggle like we did and I would love to see the kids go through the changes that I have seen in our daughter. I highly recommend the book «At Wits End» written by Jill Stowell. You will see that this company is serious about helping kids and that Jill has done the hard grunt work constantly learning, getting trained up herself and asking the questions «can this be remedied and how and is there a better way?» for 25+ years.
The information nights are really worth going to. SLC have helped 100’s of children with a variety of learning styles and challenges and I am
grateful that my daughter is one of them.

We feel SO LUCKY that we found this place! Our son was diagnosed at 3 with a speech/​language delay, and language processing issues. Thus began his special education experience, starting with a language based preschool and speech and occupational therapy services once he got into elementary school. We saw progress with these services but saw our son struggling with homework in third grade. Fourth grade was a struggle from the beginning and we knew we needed to get him some help, but didn’t know where to start. I also knew that getting a tutor wouldn’t help him, and that his issues went way beyond not understanding the homework.
By sheer coincidence I stumbled upon Stowell Learning Center after a good friend who knew how stressed out I was about this forwarded me an email she received about a homework help seminar. When I arrived, I was given a book called «At Wits End» that was written by the owner. I politely accepted, but knew I wouldn’t read it. While the seminar really was specifically about helpful homework strategies, I didn’t really know who Stowell was, or what they did. So, I signed up to go to their information night, about a week later.
During that time, I just so happened to flip through the book I was given and quickly realized they were describing my son. I couldn’t believe it — all of these bizarre things I had noticed him do while he was working, like dropping random words when he read out loud, things I thought only he did, were being talked about IN THIS BOOK! So, I read the book cover to cover in no time, and couldn’t believe there was someone who not only knew about these behaviors, but could explain why they were happening, knew how to fix them AND they happened to be located about ten minutes from my home!
The information night reiterated a lot of what read about in the book and just confirmed that this was exactly the help we were looking for. I signed him up to get tested by them about a week later. He got tested, then my husband and I met with them later that afternoon to discuss the results. (My husband was also surprised by all of this, and I wanted him to be there just to make sure he was hearing all of the same things I was, since it almost seemed too good to be true.)
The test was three hours long. When we met to go over the findings, I couldn’t believe that the staff learned so much about our son in those three hours. They picked up on all kinds of behaviors and issues, some very subtle that we knew about but weren’t really being addressed by his teachers. We were so impressed! These strangers, who didn’t know us and just met out son, really had his learning issues thoroughly summed up and understood in the short time they spent with him. Even more unexpected was their casual attitude about the whole thing. We never knew this kind of help even existed and here they were saying they have been working with and helping kids just like our son for 30 years and know they can FIX these problems permanently! We couldn’t start fast enough. Although this therapy is extremely expensive, we knew we had to try it.
We have been going to Stowell for 6 months now and have seen some amazing changes in our son. After 7 years of speech therapy, his speech was cleaned up in about 5 months. There are sounds he was never able to make, such as «R» always sounded like a «W» along with other letter combinations — th, sh, etc. Now he can make all of those sounds. There are so many words that are sounding so normal after hearing him mispronounce them his entire life! He is also so much more aware of everything, including himself. It is this kind of self awareness that has made it possible for him to focus, when he was always so wiggly and distracted before. We see his stamina in this department constantly improving, making it possible to concentrate and better understand schoolwork. Overall, he is more aware of everything and engaged with his surroundings. This has been life changing for our son. For the first time, we feel like we are getting him exactly what he needs and the peace of mind that comes with this is priceless. We still have a ways to go to get him caught up but we are very hopeful that this will happen, as we continue to see him grow, improve and progress every day with this kind of help.
We are ever so grateful for the staff at the Irvine location. Everyone has been so wonderfully supportive and amazing to work with. They are all so professional and truly care about him. He loves going too! He adores the staff who manage to make everything fun and positive. He notices the difference in himself, which does amazing things for his confidence. I can’t say enough about this place and the wonderful people who work there. I know there are so many kids/​families out there in need of this help, I know what it has done for us, so I try to share this information with everyone I can.