What Are Dyslexia Grants?

Dyslexia grants are grants provided to applicants with dyslexia, a recognized learning disability in which a person's brain fails to recognize symbols such as the letters of the alphabet properly. These grants may be related to courses or other education, as well as for research and supplies in treatment. They are more advantageous than loans and other forms of financing because the recipient does not need to pay back the funds.

Grants for dyslexic students are designed to provide a dyslexic person with access to proper instruction and tutoring. For example, the grant may cover the cost of working with a trained dyslexia therapist to improve reading ability. The purpose of these grants is to help students learn the fundamentals other students learn so they can be competitive. The grants are not necessarily tied to any particular subject but instead tackle the difficulties dyslexia causes in the interpretation and application of information. Similar to other scholarships and grants, dyslexia grants for instruction and tutoring may be part of an applicant's larger financial aid package, and they may have additional requirements such as being in a certain age group.

Other dyslexia grants provide funds to train teachers and others such as employers how to teach or accommodate dyslexic individuals. These grants also provide funding for programs that teach people how to recognize dyslexia in others. Dyslexia grants for educators and leaders have a wide-reaching impact, because a single trained instructor or employer can have a positive impact on many different dyslexic people, especially if the instructor or employer focuses on dyslexia through his entire career.

Some dyslexia grants concentrate only on the supplies educators or students need to address a dyslexia diagnosis. Supplies commonly purchased with dyslexia grants include items such as software programs for text proofing, scanning and predication, although a wide variety of other items also are used in hands-on activities. Educators and students often need these grants because school systems and other organizations simply do not have the budget to purchase what the dyslexic person needs.

Dyslexia grants also go toward research. People use the money from these grants to study the brains of dyslexic people and how they respond to different tools and techniques. These grants are important because people must conduct dyslexia research, similar to any research, under scientific constraints that allow for verification and reproduction of results. This means formal data review and using a sample population that is large enough to provide credibility to the results. With many people involved, dyslexia research quickly becomes expensive and often is beyond reach without grant funding.

The major benefit of using any type of dyslexia grant is that the applicant does not have to repay the grant in most cases unless the grant agreement terminates with the applicant's failure to comply with the terms. The grants essentially are a form of free money. This means that dyslexic individuals or their instructors and researchers don't have to enter into financial hardship in order to deal with or learn about the disability.