Bio

Kay MacPhee grew up in the 1940s on a farm in Long Creek, Prince Edward Island. The middle child of five, Kay’s earliest memories are of the community congregating around her family’s kitchen table to read the packets of letters sent home by her father, Melbourne MacEachern, a military police sergeant serving in the Second World War.

Receiving an education was always assumed, but never taken for granted in Kay’s family. Kay attended Prince of Wales College and began beginning her teaching career in one room schoolhouses in Hampshire and Kingston. In 1960 Kay had her first child, Lowell, who was born profoundly deaf. Kay searched all over North America to learn the best techniques for teaching speech and language in an attempt to help her son and other hearing impaired students across the Island.

Kay studied audiology at the Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech in Northampton, McGill University, as well as the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles, where her life’s work and research in speech and language was established.

Dr. MacPhee taught, and later served as principal, of the PEI School for the Hearing Impaired holding a firm belief that reading achievement in the early years is highly correlated to success later in life.

Even after retiring, Kay felt her work still wasn’t done so she opened her own clinic in Charlottetown in 1994 where she launched SpellRead, an intensive 80-hour program for those severely struggling with reading.

SpellRead began humbly but by 2001, its success had grown across North America. It was evaluated by leading international researchers and underwent rigorous clinical studies, being ranked #1 out of 153 reading programs by Power4Kids, the largest clinical reading trial in the U.S. This fact was not lost on Kaplan K-12 of New York, which acquired SpellRead in June of 2006.

In 2008, Kay joined forces with children’s author and teacher, Jim Barber, to create Ooka Island Inc. They built an engaging and effective technology tailored for young children, and founded on the same scientifically proven concepts that made SpellRead successful.

With the assistance of Acadia University, Dr. MacPhee researched and developed the specifications for a digital program. The results of this collaboration led to funding support from the National Research Council which made the development of Ooka Island’s Adaptive Learning Platform possible.

After nine years building a Charlottetown-based technology startup, Dr. Kay MacPhee sold Ooka Island to educational industry giant Scholastic Inc. who hired its employees, the majority of whom are based in PEI.

In April 2017, Dr. MacPhee sold her 2nd company, Ooka Island, to Scholastic Inc. She worked for Scholastic Digital Education as Director of Research and Learning from her Charlottetown office, studying the impact of children learning to read with Ooka Island.

Kay earned her Honorary Doctorate Degree from the University of Prince Edward Island and has various accreditations from a number of other organizations. She was a longtime supporter of various charities in her local community and a champion for literacy worldwide. In May, 2019 Kay was inducted posthumously into the Junior Achievement PEI Business Hall of fame.