LearningRx Franchise Becomes Family Business
At LearningRx, the goal is simple: “We make people smarter.”
At least, that is how Aaron Zink, Director of LearningRx in Lexington, views his job.
“It’s the most rewarding job I will ever have in my life,” he said. “For a child having terrible problems in school, we change his life path, from failure to success.”
For Zink, LearningRx is a family business. His wife, Elizabeth, is a partner, and his first hire was his mother Shelia, who home-schooled him through 12th grade.
Zink earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UK and a master’s from Western Kentucky.
While Zink worked in Nashville, his wife heard about LearningRx through an acquaintance.
Zink was skeptical at first, but after researching the program, he was sold.
LearningRx is a national “brain training” program that helps people build cognitive skills.
Unlike tutoring, brain training actually improves a person’s IQ through building neural pathways to make the brain work faster and more efficiently.
Aaron and Elizabeth trained in Colorado in 2007 and opened LearningRx on Pasadena Drive in January 2008.
At LearningRx, children get the help they need through a personalized program.
Each “brain-training” session lasts one hour. Zink describes these sessions as “intense mental workouts.”
The goal is to isolate areas of the brain that are working inefficiently and to make a “cognitive repair.”
Students work on memory, processing, logic, reasoning and more.
“The sessions are as non-academic as possible so students don’t feel like it’s homework,” Zink said.
Learn-ingRx serves children from 5 through adulthood.
Trainers, who typically are graduate students, work with students in the afternoons, evenings and weekends.
The success rates for Lexington’s LearningRx are higher than the organization’s national average.
Children who stick with the program for 3-6 months improve dramatically. Someone with an IQ of a 10-year-old, for example, can improve to an IQ of a 14-year-old.
The significance of the success is not lost on the families.
““Just the tears of joy shed at graduation by the parents . . . their children who could not read, now read fluently,” Zink said.
“It’s just so rewarding.”