Reading Specialist, Alpha - $100,000/year USD

About Alpha

Alpha is building a school around student growth, reimagining the school day around faster learning, stronger mentorship, and more time for students to build real-world skills. Adults here are called Guides, not teachers—you are not delivering content. You make sure students actually do the work, want to do the work, and get unstuck when the app can't do it for them.

What You Will Be Doing

• Running short structured-literacy workshops with two to four students—diagnosing a phonics or decoding gap from running records and fluency probes, teaching a sequence you designed for it, and checking that it transferred
• Coaching students through app-based core learning: seeing who has stalled, asking the question that unsticks them, holding the daily goal
• Leading morning launch, life-skills workshops, and check-chart activities that keep six-year-olds moving
• Driving students to their weekly app goals with school currency, leaderboards, and gamification pitched at their age
• Staying with your students through lunch, recess, and closing, meeting refusal and frustration with a plan built for that particular child

What You Won't Be Doing

• The pull-out intervention room and the quiet caseload that goes with it are not part of this role. Reading groups are roughly a tenth of your week and happen inside the day, not beside it
• Delivering a published program with fidelity to someone else's scope and sequence
• Writing IEPs and 504 plans, chasing testing paperwork, or sitting on curriculum committees
• Planning lessons for a full class every night. Your planning is narrow and diagnostic
• Handing your students off while you take a prep block. You are with them launch to closing

Reading Specialist Key Responsibilities

Get every K-3 student to their daily learning goals, and close the reading gaps that keep them from getting there on their own.

Basic Requirements

• Willing to work on-site at one of the campuses listed below, with relocation support
• At least 3 years working directly with children ages 4-9: teaching, coaching, tutoring, camps, youth programs, children's theater, or similar settings where kids showed up because of you
• At least 2 years of that experience teaching reading in grades K-3, within the last 5 years
• Completed structured-literacy training: LETRS, IMSE, Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Reading System, Fundations, UFLI, CERI, Neuhaus, SIPPS, Really Great Reading, or similar; or a master's in reading or literacy
• Bachelor's degree in any subject. A teaching certificate is not required
• Comfortable spending about 90% of your day guiding students through app-based learning, workshops, and campus routines, and 10% on reading sessions
• Willing to work with all K-3 students, not only struggling readers
• Legally authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship

Nice-to-have Requirements

• You can keep a room of six-year-olds engaged with nothing but your energy and a good activity
• Tired children kept coming back to your after-school or summer program
• Experience with reading platforms (Amira, Lexia, i-Ready) or diagnostic assessments (DRA, DIBELS, AIMSweb)
• You can name a specific child whose decoding you fixed, and say how you did it
• You have worked in a non-traditional school model: charter, micro-school, Montessori, or hybrid

Current Openings

• AZ - Phoenix and Scottsdale
• OK - Oklahoma City and Tulsa
• TX - Dallas, Fort Worth (Keller), Plano, and The Woodlands
• UT - Park City (Salt Lake City)

Interested in a different Alpha campus? Apply anyway, name your preferred location, and we will route you to the right opening.

Pay & Schedule

• $100,000/year salaried, paid weekly
• Day-one health, dental, and vision benefits
• 40 hours/week, five days a week, on-site at one Alpha campus
• Relocation support available