Sydney (Moses) Burns (2009)

After getting her B.A. in Psychology from San Francisco State University in 2013, Sydney (Moses) Burns (JMPS Class of 2009) worked as a literacy specialist in the greater San Francisco area before opening her own clinic in Phoenix five years ago.

In San Francisco she worked with her mentor Amber Lamprecht, where the “tutoring environment felt more like a home than a clinic,” Sydney says. “The center was designed in a way that kids instantly felt comfortable. It had lots of tactile seating, games and furniture for movement breaks and was child-centered (rather than parent-centered).”

When she and her now-husband Dane returned to Phoenix in 2016, Sydney looked for a literacy clinic that had that same comfort and child-centeredness. Instead she found literacy centers that felt “more like a dentist’s office.”

She started doing literacy tutoring solo. Soon her schedule was booked, as well as her waitlist.

With some encouragement from her close friend and fellow JMPS alumna Molly Hoover (Class of 2009), along with investments from her clients, Sydney founded her own literacy clinic, Arcadia Literacy and Learning, in Phoenix. Now approaching its fifth anniversary, Arcadia has served dozens of students with dyslexia, ADHD, and other tutoring needs. It employs 11 people, a handful of whom are full-time with benefits.

Sydney says her experience at JMPS shaped her willingness to open her own clinic.

“There’s quite a culture of ‘just try it' [at JMPS]. If you’ve never done it just give it a try, and if you’re not perfect you’re not going to be judged for that,” she says.

As a student she took part in many of the extracurricular offerings at JMPS, including string quartet, cheer, softball, and numerous plays, which she knows she wouldn’t have done at other schools.

She says this time of exploration at JMPS was crucial to her current entrepreneurship.

“I have a very strong mindset that ‘if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. You didn’t lose anything.’ And that’s probably in part from trying so many things at JMPS and there being very little judgment and pressure to be perfect,” she says.

JMPS influence on career path

Since the age of eight, Sydney has known that she wanted to go into the psychology field. She thinks this probably came from growing up in a neurodiverse family and realizing that everyone has his or her own way of communicating.

“I had a lot of people surrounding me who had very different processing styles and personality styles, so I learned to adjust to everybody around me,” Sydney says.

Mrs. Amy Schilling, one of Sydney’s most encouraging teachers, helped her along this path.

Despite Sydney’s own struggles with dyslexia, “Something about the way she taught Humanities just made sense to me,“ Sydney says. “It was such an important subject for me, because it really fueled the idea that human behavior drives society, and society drives human behavior.”

One tiny comment in particular from Mrs. Schilling had a lasting impact.

After grading one of Sydney’s Humanities papers during her senior year, Mrs. Schilling asked Sydney what she planned to study in college. When Sydney told her “psychology,” Mrs. Schilling replied, “Perfect…I was going to tell you after reading your paper that you should consider that.”

This solidified Sydney’s path. Having earned her B.A. in Psychology, she is now pursuing a Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Grand Canyon University. She studies part-time while also running Arcadia, with an expected graduation date of 2024.

Once she graduates Sydney plans to open an all-inclusive therapy center where kids can access a counselor, a speech therapist, and a physical therapist if they have a diagnosis that requires more than one therapy.

“I notice that parents are coming from one therapy, dropping their students off for reading therapy, and then going off to another therapy immediately afterward…My goal is to have one space for that,” Sydney says.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Sydney had planned to slow down her business while she pursued her graduate work part-time. But “COVID has changed how invested parents are in kids’ education,” she says. Demand picked up dramatically during the pandemic. These days Arcadia is busier than ever, with her limiting factors being space and staffing.

Looking back at JMPS

Sydney’s parents enrolled her in JMPS in seventh grade somewhat against her wishes, as she had wanted to attend a school for dance.

“It finally clicked for me what a great experience JMPS was once I went to college,” she says. “That’s when I got to see what other people’s experiences were, not just what I thought that they were. I could see how much more prepared for things I was, especially the writing component.”

Another thing Sydney now appreciates about JMPS is that she “always liked my teachers. At the time I didn’t realize how valuable that was.” Now she works with students who immediately tell her that their teachers don’t like them or whose teachers say discouraging things to them. She tries to reflect on her own experiences to empathize with them, but she says, “I realize I don’t have any moments where a teacher made me feel like I was incapable.”

Literacy Expertise

Sydney notes that reading intervention is not covered under insurance and there is no legal regulation of the industry. Because of this, she says that “there is a lot of misinformation about reading intervention.”

Some of Sydney’s favorite dyslexia resources include: The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan and The Dyslexic Advantage. She recommends these ADHD resources: Smart but Scattered and Taking Charge of ADHD.

When it comes to struggling readers in grades 1 through 3, she is hoping to collaborate with creative writers to write books with complex content and simple words, such as

Notebook of Doom, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Bad Guys, Wonder, and the Wayside School.