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The Rollins Center for Language & Literacy, a program of the Atlanta Speech School, and its free online professional development platform, Cox Campus, have been serving Atlanta and communities far beyond Georgia for the past two decades. Founded on the purpose of breaking the cycle of illiteracy for children whose families have experienced generational denied access to educational opportunity, the vision of the Rollins Center today is Literacy and Justice for All.
In 1938, Atlanta Speech School’s founder Katherine Hamm started the School seeking to bring the experience of her child, who was deaf and learned to talk and read, to every child in need of those services. Over the more than 85-year history of the School, expanding equity and access to every child has remained the driving force forward.
“The integrity of our Mission comes from having been started by Mrs. Hamm, who was experiencing a personal challenge with the means to address it – and was morally compelled to make sure that every child could find their voice. ‘Find their voice’ was literal then. Today, that unconditional commitment is figurative, to ensure every child finds their voice to decide their own future and to make the greatest difference in the lives of others. The Rollins Center makes this mission possible,” says Comer Yates, Executive Director of the Atlanta Speech School.
The School’s commitment to educational equity led to its role as the special education arm of Metro Atlanta public school systems from 1947 through 1975, when federal law changed special education policies and practices.
The Wardlaw School of the Atlanta Speech School then opened to serve children with dyslexia. Dyslexia, as defined by the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was, and is, restrictive- inherently dependent upon ZIP code, race and ethnicity.
In 1999, B Wardlaw visited the Wardlaw School to see the school his parents had funded. He questioned, from a Wardlaw School hallway, the thousands of children who would not have the opportunity to attend but who needed the services.
In 2001, a report of the National Reading Panel was published recognizing that every child could learn to read if they had access to the right kind of instruction – but that teachers where not being taught what that looked like. The Speech School saw that the national illiteracy rates reported by the Panel reflected false expectations that had been around for centuries: some children would read, and some would not.
The School had the singular expertise to meet the needs of those who would struggle to read, having spent decades working first with children who were deaf and hard of hearing, then operating as the Special Ed department of all metro Atlanta public schools, then through the Wardlaw School.
Soon after, the Rollins family stepped in. Randall Rollins’ grandchildren were at the Speech School. From rural Ringgold, Georgia himself, Rollins was compelled to support those for whom academic resources were not available.
Yates recalls, “The Rollins family came forward and put incredible trust in the Speech School. Like Mrs. Hamm, they were driven by the idea that if their children had access to this instruction, all children should have it. They made a $3 Million gift, and a charge to serve all children. We had no partner yet, no staff; only their investment and trust. We hired a brilliant reading researcher and professor from the University of Delaware – Dr. Deborah Knight.”
“We were serving 180 children in our Wardlaw School program and knew that we needed to make the experiences of each child available to every child, everywhere. We just had to figure out how,” said Dr Knight, of the period when she was hired. “I pulled in these amazing Wardlaw teachers. These first efforts coincided with the Wardlaw School’s Susan Rhoades having started a small school year program teaching children to read who would not have otherwise had that opportunity, Camp I Can.”
Camp I Can resulted from partnership between C.W.Hill Elementary School and All Saints Episcopal Church through which children received tutoring services. A group of students were identified as potentially dyslexic, and the partnership reached out to Wardlaw for help.
“Recognizing that we had a chance to share our practices with other teachers as Susan taught the boys to read, we created a summer professional development program for APS teachers during the boys’ experience. Ten extraordinarily dedicated teachers joined us,” says Yates. “They recognized that their training was not sufficient.”
They observed the boys receiving instruction in the morning, had conversations at lunchtime with Susan about practices they observed, and participate in professional development in the afternoon.
“One teacher, I’ll never forget,” recalls Yates,” Helen Hampton had been a teacher for thirty years. At the end of the summer she made a promise that she said she had never been able to make before. She promised she would teach every child to read in the coming year. At the end of the school year, she reported that she honored her promise.”
Inspired by the resolve of the teachers, the idea for the Rollins Center was brought to the Speech School Board of Directors. Several championed the idea. “They offered an executive perspective – these amazing business leaders who were both visionary and tactical. They were hugely committed to literacy and believed in our work,” said Dr. Knight. “And Mr. Rollins charged us to be data-driven and challenged us to create something strong enough that we could award credentials and change the very way teachers were taught- and he challenged us to make it scalable.”
From the beginning, the success of the Rollins Center depended upon strong partnerships. Charles R. Drew Charter School, the city’s first public charter school, partnered with Rollins from the very start, in 2004. Tom Cousins, spearheading the transformation of East Lake through the East Lake Foundation (now supported by the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta) had created Drew Charter School as a model for educational reform. “He was committed to doing it the right way. It was a tremendous opportunity,” said Yates.
Dr.Cynthia Kuhlman, the CF Foundation’s Director of Student Achievement was hired to start a high school at Drew – but understood that children under 5 were not receiving what they needed as the foundation for school. She believed that, to meet the critical need, birth-5 should be the focus. With the Rollins Center, Drew started Pre-K in what are now called the Cox Pre-K classrooms.
The Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation (of the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation) had invested in capital improvements for the YMCA and Sheltering Arms (SA) childcare centers. Ed Munster, Executive Director of the YMCA, approached Whitehead to further invest in Rollins Center training and to fund the same investment for Sheltering Arms teachers. Whitehead agreed to do so at both the YMCA and Sheltering Arms, with the stipulation that Rollins Center’s efforts needed to ultimately impact all 130,000 children born in Georgia each year.
With the success of the Cox Pre-K Classrooms at Drew, the leadership at the time of Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning’s (DECAL) partnered with Rollins in to deliver seminars for hundreds of their teachers in six locations across the state. Whitehead’s requirement to impact all Georgia’s children remained Rollins’ primary objective.
As a result, the Rollins Center approached the Cox Foundation with an idea to carry forward the YMCA and Sheltering Arms’ teachers’ experience through an online platform – which became Cox Campus. “The Cox Foundation insisted on making Cox Campus FREE. The Foundation was adamant. There should be no financial barriers to educators accessing the science. Literacy had been denied to too many for far too long,” said Dr. Ryan Lee James, Director of the Rollins Center and Chief Academic Officer of the Atlanta Speech School.
The Rollins Center has continued to seek financial and intellectual investment allowing it to define, refine and provide a free learning community through which educators and healthcare providers all over the world pursue professional development. For that purpose, Rollins partners with preeminent scholars across the sciences of healthy brain development, language acquisition, literacy, and deep reading brain construction.
Cox Campus has propelled the work of the Rollins Center to a global scale – making the sciences and their application available to educators and child-facing adults everywhere through the free courses, resources, and community of the online Cox Campus.
- Today, Cox Campus has more than 310,000 members across all fifty states and 138 countries.
- More than $60 Million has been invested in the Rollins Center and Cox Campus by local and national philanthropies that are committed to keeping the science free and accessible for everyone.
- Cox Campus has generated over $100 Million in course value at no cost to districts or educators. (From 2014 to the end of July 2024, 668,159 courses have been completed, at an estimated value of $150/course.)
- Cox Campus is the only FREE professional development addressing the literacy continuum from the last trimester of pregnancy through third grade.
- Beginning in 2017, Rollins has joined with Grady Hospital to create Talk With Me Baby. A partnership between parents and health care professionals, TWMB ensures that every parent leaves the birthing center with the knowledge and agency to provide the language-centered engagement each child needs in the first years of exponential brain growth.
- Cox Campus partners with more than 100 public and private organizations across the nation.
- Georgia Department of Education partners with Cox Campus to fulfill the requirements the Georgia Early Literacy Act, signed into law in 2023.
- Strategic partnerships include the states of Alabama, Ohio, Arizona and Mississippi, as well as the country of Jamaica.
- Through several partnerships, credentials are awarded to early learning teachers who complete Cox Campus coursework. By example, 40,000 Ohio early learning teachers are enrolled in Cox Campus to gain state endorsed credentials from the Ohio Department of Education.
- Talk With Me Baby is available to all birthing centers through Cox Campus.
In keeping with Mr. Rollins’ vision in 2004 and the Cox Foundation direction, Cox Campus is the only free CEU-earning, International Dyslexia Association (IDA)Accredited structured literacy pathway to the KPEERI , the Knowledge and Practice Examination for Effective Reading Instruction (KPEERI)that measures an educator’s knowledge of the principles and practices of Structured Literacy™.
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