Julie met Nora Chahbazi (founder of EBLI) while she was a Title 1 teacher in Hart, MI. She was reluctant to try EBLI and had confidence that EBLI strategies would not work for her students. However, after implementing EBLI with her 1st grade students, they climbed from the bottom of the ranks to the top in terms of student reading comprehension scores. When Julie became a principal, she wanted to make sure that the teachers working in their school were proficiently teaching their students how to read to their highest potential. She made a push to get teachers trained in EBLI, and the rest is history.