Henry Dunbar’s parents say he has a gift for learning by doing — making a fantastic omelet, helping his dad in the garage or driving any vehicle that a third grader is allowed to pilot. He works hard and is motivated to make them happy.
So they were at first baffled when Henry, their middle child of five and their oldest boy, didn’t take to academics.
Henry and his siblings were homeschooled in part so they could spend more time with their father, Aaron Dunbar, an air traffic controller with an irregular schedule.
The setup worked well for his two older sisters. Even his younger sister, then a toddler, started picking up knowledge by osmosis. But concepts like letter sounds or days of the week didn’t stick in Henry’s brain.
“When he was very little, it was almost like he was messing with you,” said his mother, Abbey Dunbar, the family’s primary educator. “Because it was like, gone, truly gone. As if we’d never done it.”
The family tried postponing kindergarten for a year, joining a homeschooling co-op and sending Henry to an Olathe public school for special education services.
The services helped, but didn’t seem like enough. Henry, normally a happy, energetic kid, would come home drained and discouraged from spending part of the day in a loud room with classmates who teased him.
Finally, the family turned to Horizon Academy, a private school in Roeland Park that enrolls students who have dyslexia and similar disabilities. Henry is formally diagnosed with a severe auditory processing disorder and appears to have dyslexia based on testing at school.
Dyslexia is common. An often-cited figure is that 20% of people have symptoms, though some estimates are lower. But parents around the metro area told The Beacon help wasn’t readily available.
Horizon serves as a small-scale — and pricey — example of what it looks like to orient education around helping dyslexic students succeed.
Henry, who recently turned 10, has started to thrive in an environment that’s geared toward his needs, with highly trained staff, minimal distractions and tiny classes grouped by skill level.
“It’s less tiring and my brain doesn’t have to worry about all that stuff,” Henry said. “I’m on the same pace as everybody else.”
Providing enough resources
A pediatric occupational therapist and mother of three, Kelly Reardon noticed her oldest child, Lily, was slow to catch on to early reading skills.
At first, teachers at her Catholic school in Johnson County weren’t worried.
“I didn’t want to be that hypochondriac parent,” Reardon said. “I would always lean on her teachers to fact check my own perceptions.”
As Lily entered kindergarten, Reardon’s worries grew. Teachers still said Lily was doing great.
“She’d come home and fall apart,” Reardon said. “I know what that means. ‘We’re not actually doing great. We’re just holding it together, barely getting by.’”
In first grade, a teacher validated Reardon’s concerns, prompting her to seek dyslexia testing.
Reardon saw Lily’s diagnosis as a way to explain to others — and to her smart, perfectionist daughter — why it was harder for her to learn certain things and what support she needed.
She also knew she needed more resources. So she enrolled Lily in Horizon Academy’s summer program.
“Lily had come home from camp and said, ‘Mom, can I go to school here next year?’” Reardon said. “For a first grader to ask to make a change to a new school, that’s a big decision.”
Reardon doesn’t blame Lily’s original school for not having all the support she needs.
”What was more challenging for me was the amount of pressure on me to be that advocate for her and convince myself and convince others that she needed that,” she said. “It makes me sad to think about the other families that have no idea.”
Though families’ first instinct is often to trust that schools will alert them to dyslexia and provide appropriate services, some find the burden is on them to notice the problem, seek testing, advocate for services and search for the most effective school or private tutoring.
Horizon encourages parents to be involved and educates them about dyslexia, but some say the school’s expertise lifts the burden of feeling it’s all on them to figure out a solution.
“Before we found Horizon, we had a lot of fear, because we were kind of carrying it all,” said Abbey Dunbar. “To walk into a place where they’re not afraid at all of these challenges and they see it every day and they know exactly how to help … It’s just kind of that relief.”
How Horizon works
A walk down the hallways gives a sense of what Horizon Academy is all about.
One section showcases stickers students earn for using vocabulary words in context. Another uses colorful ribbons to illustrate the components of skilled reading. Yet another features photos and descriptions of famous people with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.
“We just want our kids to be aware that it’s only one part of you,” Head of School Vicki Asher said. “We’re going to teach you how to read, but look at all these other gifts that you can develop and nurture.”
The Dunbars are struck by the focus on Henry’s strengths, something the family also leaned into when they realized he struggled with academics. When he spoke with The Beacon, Henry was still excited about getting chosen to drive a robot that day in school.
They also appreciate the school’s attention to detail — such as not scheduling lawn mowing at distracting times — and the high capacity for tailoring instruction to Henry’s needs.
During the fall of 2024, Asher said Horizon had 117 students and 46 faculty members, less than a 3-to-1 student to teacher ratio.
Although students might meet in groups of 12 or more for homeroom, specials and certain subjects, they study key topics like reading and math in tiny groups with similar skill levels.
The average reading group includes about three students, Asher said, but some receive one-on-one attention.
Reardon said since switching to Horizon, Lily is making progress, experiencing successes and having less emotional difficulty after school because she’s not overwhelmed.
“They’re matching her with kids that have similar missing skills, and then the instruction is taught specifically targeting those skills,” Reardon said.
Faculty members are trained in Orton-Gillingham, a method designed specifically for people with dyslexia.
Gabi Guillory Welsh, Horizon’s director of therapeutic language and literacy, said most of the school’s teachers hold an associate level certification that requires a 60-hour course and 100-hour practicum.
The high proportion of highly trained faculty comes with a high price tag.
Asher said the school raises funds to provide scholarships for 35% to 40% of students. In the past, scholarships have been about $8,000 on average and up to about $17,000. Tuition was nearly $30,000 for the 2024-25 school year and will be nearly $31,000 for 2025-26.
As a business owner, Reardon understands the price tag.
“They’re paying people. They’re providing this expensive training to each staff member that works there to provide the best service to these kiddos,” she said. “Of course it costs an arm and a leg.”
But she worries about families who can’t afford Horizon.
“The worst thing would be ‘I know my child needs to go there, but I just can’t afford that,’” she said.
Horizon is open to students from kindergarten through ninth grade.
The school is looking for students it thinks it can serve well based on its expertise, Guillory Welsh said, often meaning that their primary diagnosis is dyslexia.
Horizon generally can’t serve students who are primarily diagnosed with behavioral or emotional issues, though it finds receiving proper instruction can help with some of those concerns, such as reducing school anxiety.
Students arrive at various ages, often a few years into elementary school.
“Our goal is to bring them in, remediate, rebuild them and then return them to their traditional school,” said Asher.
For most children, that could mean attending for two to five years.
When The Beacon visited in fall 2024, Horizon had two kindergarten students for the first time and only a few first graders. Meanwhile, there were two whole homeroom classes of fourth graders and two more classes that were mixes of fourth and fifth graders.
Guillory Welsh said that pattern represents a paradox: The best time to intervene is in the early years, but it’s rare to get a diagnosis that early.
“Students have kind of missed that window (for early intervention) by the time they start failing,” she said. “They could have been learning differently.”
How dyslexic kids learn
After years of struggling to get proper services for her son, also named Henry, Annie Watson knew he needed a way to catch up on his reading skills.
Full-time tuition at Horizon Academy wasn’t an option.
“We couldn’t afford that,” she said. “But we could afford the tutoring — barely.”
So Henry started to attend twice-weekly sessions after school, followed by a summer intensive program, both through Horizon. He progressed so well that his regular teachers were confused why he had a special education plan.
Henry’s tutor “saved his life,” Watson said. “That one person, and the fact that we made it work financially.”
Watson thinks one of the keys to Henry’s progress was the Orton-Gillingham method.
Teaching methods that don’t focus on phonemic awareness (the ability to recognize and play with speech sounds) and phonics (the relationship between letters and sounds) make it harder for many students to learn to read — something some state governments are trying to fix.
For dyslexic students, proper reading instruction is especially crucial and they might need more repetition and multisensory teaching methods for the information to click.
Full-time and tutoring students at Horizon learn little-known rules of the English language, like why “forgotten” has two Ts but “traveling” only has one L. (It has to do with which syllable of the root word is accented.)
Recently, Watson said, she and her daughter disagreed about how to pronounce a word. Henry told them they were both wrong, citing a rule so elaborate she wondered if he was pranking them. But when she looked it up, Henry was right about the pronunciation and the obscure rule.
Henry Dunbar, the full-time Horizon student, is at an earlier point in his education. But his parents said they were already struck by his progress.
“It feels so good to be on this side of things, as things are starting to work and things are clicking,” Aaron Dunbar said.
Henry has “been working diligently here. He’s been fitting in so well. He’s made great friends. He’s doing excellent with the teachers, and he’s now reading, which before he wasn’t doing,” he said. “Like he’s actually — he knows how to read.”
