Business Focus: Kaleyedoscoptics

Photos by Kelly Sue Photography

Is your young Johnny or Suzie smart, but does not bring home good grades from school? Despite his or her efforts to bear down, study more, and show improvement, do the results continue to be disappointing and discouraging? Do you have a child whose learning potential has been written off by a teacher or perhaps even a health professional for various claimed causes, such as a low IQ, dyslexia, or attention deficit disorder?

Becky Williams-LeBlanc hears those kinds of stories all the time, and rarely (if ever) finds them to be justified. “There’s never been a person I couldn’t help, except for a child who refuses to obey,” she says. LeBlanc is owner and operator of Kaleyedoscoptics, LLC, which specializes in visual and physical coordination training in conjunction with academic training for children age 5 to adults. She offers the tutoring at a location near Spring. The tutoring concentrates on coordinating the eyes, brain, and hands to work as a unit in the processing of information.

LeBlanc holds a bachelor of science degree and is also certified as a level one instructor for The Writing Road to Reading, by Ramalda Spalding; Brain Gym; and Adult Literacy Tutoring. LeBlanc began her journey to helping students overcome reading and writing problems as a young mother home schooling her own children. Two daughters, twins, were born prematurely, as a result suffering eye abnormalities, both of the left eye. One girl was severely cross-eyed, she says. “Her left eye disappeared behind her nose.” The other twin had a different problem. “Her left eyelid drooped down over the pupil of her eye.”

While LeBlanc was attending one of the workshops on effective home schooling, the workshop leader, Carol Bailey, asked her if the cross-eyed child she had noticed was hers. When LeBlanc said yes, Bailey told her, “I can fix that,” and did. Her daughter is no longer cross-eyed.

Bailey, a retired second grade school teacher from New Orleans, began sharing her knowledge about the benefits of visual processing and strengthening eye muscles. “When you look at something,” LeBlanc says, “you have two eyes, and two sides of the brain. The brain’s job is to put those two images together. If any part of that process is not working, then that’s where you get image reversals, upside down letters, and confusion. My goal is to get the children to be able to use both eyes and put the images together.”

Application of that knowledge was so successful in reversing her daughters’ eye problems, that by the late 1980s, visual coordination training was a regular part of LeBlanc’s home schooling methodology. Her family and friends, noticing improvements in academics and intelligence of LeBlanc’s children, started asking her if she could help them with their children. “Before I knew it,” she recalls laughingly, “I had 15 kids in my house.”

In 2002, LeBlanc began offering her services to individuals outside of family and friends. She is founder and owner of Kaleyedoscoptics, LLC, A Visual Approach to Learning. The business, she said, eventually became “bigger than I could handle.” In May of 2015, LeBlanc and her husband Mike, a retired Louisiana state employee, decided to move from Prairieville, Louisiana to Texas, and settled near Spring. One of her daughters, Gabbrielle Williams, lives in the area and is a doctor of chiropractic in Conroe.

As a lay person, LeBlanc says, she uses a variety of exercises that help the children. For instance, she says, “I use eye patches, so we can do the exercise with the right eye, and then the left eye, and then both together.” She uses pitch back exercises to improve eye and hand coordination, where the client throws a ball into a net that throws back the ball. Along with other physical exercises, she teaches phonics, spelling, reading, writing, English, and basic math skills.

Enrollment in Kaleyedoscoptics begins with a consultation between a child’s parent and LeBlanc, usually by phone, then an evaluation, which could result in a recommendation that the child be given a thorough eye examination by an optometrist.

In her evaluation process, LeBlanc administers a battery of tests to determine the child’s visual processing as well as abilities in spelling, handwriting, reading, phonics, and basic mathematics. She encourages parents to watch the tests. “I want to educate the parents so we can be partners in their child’s progress,” she says.

Although costs for the program vary depending on the severity of a client’s problem, a typical program would include $300 for the initial evaluation, a $50 registration fee, and $60 per hour for a 12-week contract, ideally scheduling at least two hours per week. Generally, the sessions take place in a one-on-one environment between the client and LeBlanc. LeBlanc describes the classes saying, “Like a kaleidoscope changes every time you look into it, so too do my classes change with the needs of each student. No two classes look the same.” Sometimes, an upswing in performance can occur early in the contract schedule. “I have had children go from getting “F”s to “A”s in as little as three weeks.”

LeBlanc says the program can produce “profound” results. For example, seven years ago, LeBlanc says a boy age nine who was brought to her had suffered brain damage from oxygen depreciation and did not know the alphabet and couldn’t count to ten. “Now, he’s reading a fourth grade textbook, learning how to do math, and labeling all of the parts of speech for a sentence.”

His parents drive him once a month from Mandeville, Louisiana to train with LeBlanc for five hours on Friday and three hours on Saturday, then return to Louisiana.

LeBlanc believes many of those responsible for evaluating struggling students label them “unteachable” much too quickly. “Our society looks at the brokenness and assumes there is no potential,” she says. “I look at them when they walk through the door for the potential, not the brokenness.”

In addition to working with clients in her home, LeBlanc is a volunteer at Bridgewood Farms in Montgomery County, in operation since 1967 to provide various programs and respite care to teens and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Looking forward, LeBlanc says she hopes to be able to expand her services soon. Additional information is available at (832) 799-2606.

The Business Focus is chosen each month by random drawing from among Postcards contract advertisers. To learn more call 936-293-1188.