Is your child falling behind in school? Increasingly, parents pay private learning centers to teach their children skills missed in the classroom.

From the beginning of first grade, Mary Beth Chinners struggled to learn how to read. By the end of second grade, the problem was firmly established.

Mary Beth would try to read her homework assignments but would stumble and insist that her mother Elaine read to her instead. The girl would try again, only to break down, defeated. She could read the words, but the sentences and paragraphs were often difficult for her to understand.

"She'd get so frustrated, she'd slam her books shut," Elaine Chinners said. "She was really down on herself, she was crying all the time. I went to the teachers and told them my concerns. They said, `It will click.' Well, it just wasn't clicking. She "absolutely had made it up in her mind that she couldn't read."

Chinners and her husband, C.W. were frustrated too. They didn't know where to go for help. Pretty soon, Mary Beth was in third grade and the gap between her and her fellow students' reading abilities became more evident.

That's when the couple started paying closer attention to the ads they saw for learning centers--private companies offering tutorial services. There was a Sylvan Learning Center close to their home in Summerville, South Carolina, and they decided to check it out. An initial assessment showed that May Beth was 10 months behind her grade level, prompting them to enroll her in a reading program.