Kerri is a life-long learner of teaching and learning. She began her career teaching fourth grade in a Boston Catholic School where all students learned the basic skills of reading and spelling and engaged in daily handwriting practice. These skills allowed a majority of students to break the reading and spelling code by third grade. However, in her class of thirty-five students, there were always a few students who continued to struggle. These students led Kerri on a journey to seek ways of reaching these students. In 1988, Kerri left the classroom to pursue a master’s degree in reading from Lesley University and became the director of The Writing Project in Cambridge Public Schools working with K-2 teachers to increase literacy skills and with parents to create a publishing center for student work.

In 1995, Kerri’s son Chase entered the world. His early verbal skills entertained the family, yet when he entered pre-school, he had difficulty recognizing basic shapes, colors, and even the letters in his own name. In 2002, Chase was diagnosed with dyslexia and entered second grade at the Carroll School, a private school for dyslexic learners in Lincoln, Massachusetts. It was here that dedicated and highly-trained teachers taught Chase to read using the Orton-Gillingham approach, a research-based, direct and explicit, multisensory method specifically designed for dyslexics. Kerri entered the Garside Institute for Teacher Training at the Carroll School in 2002 and remained there for 9 years. It was here that she gained the skills to teach struggling readers. Kerri began as a staff tutor and moved on to become a staff trainer and eventually a Fellow in the Orton-Gillingham Academy. She now trains teachers in the OG approach. Kerri finds it particularly rewarding to work with public school teachers for it is her strong belief that reading is a civil right, and all children, regardless of their economic status, deserve the right to be taught how to read and write.

Kerri is a Massachusetts-certified reading specialist who currently works as a reading and ELA teacher in the Intensive Reading and Writing (IRWL) program in Manchester-Essex Middle School in Manchester-by-the-Sea. She is also an accredited training Fellow in the Orton-Gillingham Academy (OGA) and a dyslexia specialist in the International Dyslexia Association. She runs online OG trainings and prepares teachers to become Associate Level Certified members of the Orton-Gillingham Academy, the gold standard in teaching the O-G approach. An extraordinary fact about OGA is that every member of the Academy can trace their roots back to Orton or Gillingham depending on the lineage of their Academy training Fellow. Kerri credits Louise Freese and Angela Wilkins from the Carroll School for their thoughtful and skilled mentorship.

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