Getting Started

Our goal is to listen to our concerns  and gather just enough information to begin helping by discerning if your needs would best be met by our services or by an allied professional. We work very hard to keep your student from slipping further down the cracks.  60% of these calls result in an Intake as the next step.
We set up a structured 90 minute Parent and/ or Student Intake or send you referral names and numbers. 

This means you have some homework!
After setting up the Intake meeting time and location, you will receive an email letter instructing you about how to prepare for it.  There are downloadable forms on this website.
You prepare for the Intake meeting and, once we get your paperwork, we do too!

The Intake session is our first in-person meeting and is 1 hour to 1 hour 30 minutes (preferably in the morning) consultation meeting. Our goal for the Intake is to define the next steps toward a solution for you and your student.
Based on the information we have gotten from you in preparation for the intake we:

• Informally assess your student’s thought processing, affect, and academic achievement while at least one guardian is present.
• Discuss with you our initial informational observations and findings to define a rough draft of the Plan of Action (PA).
• Give you information that you can start taking action on. That information will be in the draft of the PA, which identifies the next steps for you to take on your student’s behalf. A PA draft make take a week to get to you, so taking notes is important in the Intake meeting.

Talk to us about how you receive credit for most of your Intake session fees. 

After the Intake, you will be getting the PA draft with the immediately actionable items clearly laid out. You can start helping!
A PA is a 1 page document that, at this stage, will target one of these 4 scenarios based on the most important 3 issues that we see needs attention first:

• Referral to a vetted allied professional (e.g. speech therapist, school placement specialist, developmental pediatrician, dev optometrist, occupational therapist, psychologist etc…)
• Recommendation for a psychoeducational assessment
• Recommendation to start BellaMenti’s professional services
• Recommendation to do all or some of the above

The PA has 3 sections for your student:

• Immediate Intervention tasks and plan for coaching parents (if needed).
• Remediation and Development of Academic or Underlying Skills (such as Math, Reading, Working memory, Executive Functioning, etc…)
• Self-Directed Achievement and effectiveness. 

We start working the PA! We focus on establishing a rapport with your student and observing more of the details about how they think and learn. 

Parent’s and BellaMenti meet to review.
The PA goes through another revision to become more detailed about remediation.
Between the 6th and 25th session the parent complies with the home or in-school pieces of their student’s PA. The between-session practice and application activities are 50% of the Success Solution. It is just like learning to play a musical instrument. Our brains are the ultimate instrument for our success in life.

We work the PA and have a parent review session every ~20 sessions. We reassess using the same informal assessment tools to see if the progress we expected is on target. We adjust the PA based on the reassessment data and prior session notes. 

We do not know when this will be.  No one does.  Learning issues run deep and are individual.  However, for reading we do know the average dyslexic or hyperlexic student takes between 60-240 hours of *appropriate instruction for reasonable decoding, encoding, and/or comprehension remediation for most (90%) of students.
What we find: the average amount of time for complete reading remediation is an average of 80 hours/ year for 2-3 years. We did exit one student after only six weeks (12 sessions) of study skills remediation.
**Working Memory programs have data to support their program-specific improvement timelines, but less is known (currently) about their ***generalizability.
Our typical student decides they have the tools to move on after 2 chronological years (on average is 80 hours/year).
As well, we keep you well informed about the inhibiting and accelerating factors we experience.

---

* see NIH for definition of appropriate Reading Remediation Instruction
**Working memory is the amount of information one can hold in their head at any given moment.
***application to real world