Skip to content
Ellis Abel Learns.
Dysgraphia Parent Mastermind icon — Ellis Abel Learns neurodivergent parent mastermind group serving families in Sandy, UT

Ages 4-18 · Sandy, UT city

Dysgraphia Parent Mastermind — Sandy, UT

Nobody hands you a map. You get a diagnosis or a suspicion, a stack of forms, a waitlist, and a school that has its own budget to protect. Sandy has a population of about 90,231. Families in Sandy, UT who meet monthly stop losing the same year twice.

Writing difficulty is invisible until a child is asked to produce a page and cannot. Parents here trade what worked: scribing, speech-to-text, keyboarding, and the exact language that got it into a plan.

A monthly meeting in Sandy

  1. 1

    What writing looks like at home this week

  2. 2

    Assistive technology in use locally, and what it cost

  3. 3

    Occupational therapy availability in the area

  4. 4

    Plan language that has been accepted by the district

  5. 5

    One family drafts a request together

What families in Sandy, UT ask first

Is bad handwriting the same thing?

No, and the circle spends time on that difference.

Can my child use a laptop in class?

Often yes, and the families here know how that was secured locally.

Does this need a doctor?

An evaluation, usually. The circle helps you find one.

From a room in Sandy to a national count

  1. Step 1

    Your circle, in Sandy, UT

    Eight to twenty families who meet monthly. Local operations stay local: your meeting time, your venue, your rules, your members. Nothing about joining changes how your group runs.

  2. Step 2

    Your county chapter

    Every circle in the county Sandy sits in reports one number — how many families it speaks for — and agrees on three asks per school year. The chapter is who a school board, a superintendent or a county commission talks to.

  3. Step 3

    The Utah coalition

    County chapters send one delegate each. The coalition tracks state bills, testifies at hearings, and works alongside the structures Utah families already have a legal right to: the state's federally funded Parent Training and Information Center under IDEA, its Protection and Advocacy agency, and its Developmental Disabilities Council.

  4. Step 4

    The national assembly

    State coalitions meet quarterly. One count, one set of federal priorities — IDEA funding, evaluation timelines, restraint and seclusion, transition services, and the gap between what the law says and what a district does.

Utah families are not starting from nothing. Under IDEA, every state has a federally funded Parent Training and Information Center; every state also has a Protection and Advocacy agency and a Developmental Disabilities Council. Those exist to be used. What is missing almost everywhere is a local group organized enough to use them together.

If you already run something in Sandy

Keep running it. There is no merger, no renaming, no handing over your members or your money. A group that has been meeting in Sandy for years knows things no statewide organization can generate on its own. Affiliation adds two things and takes nothing: your families are counted in the Utah total, and your ask is worded the same as everyone else’s so it cannot be answered separately.

Affiliate a Sandy group · What autonomy means here · Start a county chapter

The rules that make it work

Local groups keep local control

Your meetings, your members, your money, your name. Affiliation adds a count and a shared ask. It never adds a boss.

Nobody is diagnosed here

This is a working group of parents, not a clinical service. Families share what they did and what happened. Nobody prescribes, nobody treats, nobody assesses.

Experience is shared as experience

What one district approved is a fact worth passing on. What worked for one child is a data point, not a prescription. That distinction is enforced in every meeting.

The child is not the problem to be solved

The systems around the child are. Meetings are about paperwork, access, instruction and policy — not about fixing children.

One ask, said the same way

A group of forty saying forty different things is still forty individuals. The count only becomes power when the ask is identical.

The infinity symbol, not the puzzle piece

Neurodivergent people are not missing a piece. The language and the symbols used here follow the community that lives it.

Other circles in Sandy, UT

Dysgraphia Circle near Sandy

Dysgraphia Circle everywhere in the US · All circle types · STEM summer camps in Sandy