MC Dyslexia Center Receives $60,000 Grant

Jeff Sootheran, grants advisor and Mitti Bilbo

Mississippi College’s Dyslexia Education and Evaluation Center will receive a $60,000 grant to strengthen its teaching mission to dyslexic youngsters over the next four years.

The funds come from the Florida-based Ware Foundation that provides grants improving the quality of people’s lives, with its focus on children.

“I’m just very delighted this organization saw the worth of our center,” said Mitti Bilbo, director of the program housed in a renovated three bedroom residence on the university’s East Campus. “We’re meeting the needs of children in Mississippi.”

The grant of $15,000 annually through 2016 includes funds for student scholarships, staffing and other projects to bolster the center’s teaching mission on the Clinton campus. The facility seeks to help children with reading disabilities and works to prevent dropouts. Through its efforts, the MC center often boosts a child’s reading skills by one to two levels.

The Ware Foundation was created by Miami businessman and philanthropist John Ware in 1949. For more than 60 years, the Florida foundation has donated money for child abuse prevention, medical capital improvements and research projects, environmental conservation plus an assortment of community-based needs.

Thanks to the generous grant from the Ware Foundation and the move to a more accessible facility on campus last fall, MC’s dyslexia center “is poised to provide additional services to meet the needs of our community,” said School of Education Dean Don Locke.

“Hopefully, other foundations will see the center’s potential and join us to support the services it seeks to provide for dyslexic students,” he said.

MC officials will receive the first Ware Foundation grant funds around June 1.

Previously located in Farr Hall, Mississippi College’s Dyslexia and Evaluation Center opened its doors in 2007 after being awarded a major grant from the Meridian-based Phil Hardin Foundation.

Located at 107 Fairmont Street, the dyslexia center has served children between the ages of 6 and 17, and worked with a handful of adults between the ages of 25 and 55. The vast majority of the children receiving help are Central Mississippi residents, but some youngsters live as far away as Greenwood, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg and Laurel.

Four graduate students from MC’s master’s degree program in dyslexia serve as therapists to assist the children one to two hours each afternoon.

While the MC center presently serves 11 students on the Clinton campus, the facility’s programs have reached more than 500 children over the past six years. The center’s director since its inception, Bilbo travels to school districts all over Mississippi, and to the Blair Batson Children’s Hospital in Jackson three days a week to assist dyslexic children. The center also hosts fall conferences at Mississippi College that typically reach 170 educators, parents and graduate students.

“It is such a worthwhile cause,” says grants advisor Jeff Sootheran, who doubles as the Christian university’s reference librarian. In the midst of a bad economy, he continues to search in Mississippi and around the nation for grants to aid the center’s operations.

Other recent grants going to the dyslexia center have included $1,360 in December 2011 from the Community Foundation of Greater Jackson for a portable ramp for handicapped students. The Dollar General Literacy Foundation provided $2,500 last year for supplies and instructional materials, such as flash cards and workbooks. The Gannett Foundation contributed $2,500 used largely for student scholarships in 2011.

“It’s worth the effort to find these grants,” Sootheran said.

For more information, contact Mitti Bilbo at 601.925.7649 or MBilbo@mc.edu.