Parents Sue, Plead to Keep Special UCLA School Alive

Some students with learning disabilities are attending a special school on borrowed time while their parents fight to keep the school open after this year.

The Fernald School at UCLA is scheduled to close at the end of the academic year after 65 years of promoting unusually rapid progress for students and providing teaching experience for UCLA students.

University officials decided that too little academic research is being conducted there and tried to shut the school in February. Faced with a lawsuit by parents, however, UCLA agreed late last month to keep Fernald open another year, with reduced staff, to ease transition into classes elsewhere for about 20 students.

“By keeping it intact, we believe the Los Angeles school board will find a way to keep it going,” said Stanley Fleishman, the parents’ attorney. “Also, we’d like to think the Board of Regents will make known to UC President (David) Gardner that this is something they want at the university.”

‘Truly a Miracle’

Parents of children with learning disabilities and emotional problems praise the school, which last year was staffed by 20 full-time graduate psychology students and about 250 undergraduates who taught while doing course work.

Robert Johnson said in a court deposition that Fernald’s effect on his 14-year-old son with a learning disability was “truly a miracle.”

“When he entered Fernald, he was at fifth-grade level in most subjects and third-grade in grammar,” Johnson wrote. “By April, 1986, he was working at grade level in all subjects. All my attempts to help Patrick before entering Fernald ended in disaster.”

Similar testimonials were filed by parents of a suicidal girl and an autistic young man.

But UCLA Chancellor Charles Young and psychology department chairman Bertram H. Raven said the school’s effort to serve students with a variety of problems hampered research by the staff.

“The heterogeneous mix of students at Fernald did not lend itself to a systematic study of any given population,” Raven said, adding the school’s “commitment to a relatively narrow motivational approach” and small number of students blocked “careful statistical tests of hypotheses.”

Books, Articles

Former assistant director Linda Taylor countered by pointing to 48 research articles and two books produced by Fernald staff over the last decade.

Corinne Smith, associate professor of education at Syracuse University, said teaching at Fernald “guided the entire field of education to adopt a more individualized diagnostic-prescription approach to serving children with learning and behavioral difficulties.”

But the parents’ last hope, the Los Angeles Unified School District, apparently is not likely to step in and save the school. School board member Jackie Goldberg, one of those who supported continued use of Fernald, said the hard-pressed district probably cannot afford it.

“Given our housing shortage for students in our schools right now, I’m not sure the district is in the business of operating a school like that with such a low student-teacher ratio,” Goldberg said.