I'm Ashley Guillen. I work with every one of my students myself.

I do the testing, I write the plan, and I'm the one who sits in the meeting at the school. Your child won't get handed off to a different tutor partway through the year, so nobody has to start over learning what your child needs.

Working on my own does mean I fill up, and there are times of year when I don't have room for a new student. I also run short programs over summer and winter on top of my regular students. Calling is the fastest way to find out where my schedule stands right now.

Students come to me for all kinds of things, and what a student needs changes from year to year. If you're wondering whether I cover the thing your child is struggling with, ask me on the phone and I'll give you a straight answer.

Reading is still the part I know best. Letter sounds, blending, spelling, fluency, and comprehension. That's eight years of the same work with students at every level, and it's the part of the job I enjoy most.

Some students come to me for math, or for a class they're struggling to pass before the semester ends, and I'm glad to help with that. A lot of the time the trouble isn't new material. It's gaps in foundational concepts, basic facts like multiplication and division that never fully clicked.

I email teachers, and I go to IEP meetings when you want me there. I'm not there to argue with anyone. I just want to know what the school is already working on, so we're all on the same page and I'm not spending your hour on something they have covered.

If your child has an IEP there's more to it than showing up. I read through the document, and I line my own testing up with what the IEP measures so the two can be set beside each other and actually compared. I check with the teachers that the accommodations written into it are the ones your child is getting day to day, because those two things come apart more often than you'd think. When the goals come up for review I have current progress data to put in front of the school, which matters when the last evaluation was a year or two ago and nobody has fresh numbers.

It also means you aren't stuck passing messages between me and the school on top of everything else you're already handling. I'd rather take care of that part myself.