Students With Special Needs Find Niche at Unusual School

Maggie is dyslexic. And she knows it.

“But that doesn’t bother me at all,” she says with a confidence that appears advanced for her eight years. “I know that when I leave school, I’ll be an interior decorator.”

It’s possible that Maggie is simply an unusually self-assured child. But some suspect, however, that she might also be benefiting from attending an unusual school. At Park Century School, tucked away among residential apartments on Stoner Avenue in West Los Angeles, Maggie and 50 other children receive a degree of individualized instruction and counseling that is extraordinary even for a small, specialized school.

As part of the program at Park Century, which was named as school of the year by the International Foundation for Learning Disabilities, students receive one-to-one tutoring in reading and math and attend weekly seminars with psychiatrists. The overall student-staff ratio is 2 to 1.

This makes it possible to “take into account the special nature of each student and the complex nature of a learning disability,” said Gail Spindler, who has been one of two co-directors of the school since 1976.

“There are several schools for the learning disabled, but the small student population and the large number of trained staff at Park Century make it ideal for the treatment of something as complex and personal as learning disability,” said Dr. Helmut Wursten, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the USC School of Medicine and a member of the school’s advisory board.

Because the degree and the nature of a learning disability vary with each child, group instruction, as is the norm in public schools, has its limitations, said Cathie Gaudiano, a teacher at the school.

Tutoring on a one-to-one basis with the latest special education techniques--including computers, kinesthetic methods such as drawing letters in cornmeal and visual dictionaries--is done to supplement the instruction, Gaudiano said.

Considered hereditary in origin, learning disabilities usually affect children of average or above-average intelligence. The learning disabled child may show difficulties in concentration, perception, memory, and the use of spoken or written language.

Such a student may have the potential to learn at his or her intellectual level, Spindler said, but this often is not reflected in academic performance. And this often makes the children angry and frustrated.

“They get furious,” instructor Jean Mallory said. “They are smart, and they wonder why they can’t do it. With help, they become aware of the problem and learn ways to go around it.”

Another distinctive feature of Park Century is its emphasis on the home as the classroom away from school. Teachers make a determined effort to keep in touch with parents and keep aware of conditions at home that may be affecting the child’s performance in class.

“Most public schools do not need to know about home,” Mallory said, and they tend to “treat the learning-disabled students like the rest . . . ignoring their special needs.”

Also, the chronic nature of the disability means that treatment is “24-hour-a-day work where it becomes important to work with the family to remedy the problem,” Spindler said.

Family involvement starts during the screening of the applications when “precautions against improper selection” are taken, said Genny Shain, the other co-director.

“We admit students who are primarily learning disabled and whose emotional problems arise as a result of learning disabilities and not the other way around,” said Shain, who started at Park Century in 1969 as a reading instructor.

This keeps out those applicants who have difficulty with learning because of emotional stresses in the family or negative influences of the environment. “Such students are asked to attend other programs which are exclusively designed for such problems,” Spindler said.

Once enrolled, students progress along “levels of independence” that are determined by continuous evaluation and observation, Spindler said.

At first, they receive one-to-one instruction. The next step is a small-group setting, but one in which most of the instruction is still one-to-one. As they show readiness, the students take on increasing amounts of group instruction.

By the time students reach age 12, preparations are under way for transition from Park Century’s regulated environment to a mainstream school. “How they leave is much more important than how they come in,” Spindler said.

During the student’s last year, the school’s placement section investigates public and private schools that conform to the student’s requirements.

“Once the student has been accepted, teachers here begin to instruct from the textbooks that he or she will be using in the new school. There is much less sympathy and the students are asked to strictly follow a whole variety of instructions,” Spindler said.

“My highest reward is when they go back to regular school,” said Nora Rentt, teacher for the oldest students. Rentt, who moved to Los Angeles in 1978 after teaching autistic and dyslexic students in New York City, said the students who make the most successful transition are those “who aren’t embarrassed about their disability, who don’t hesitate to ask for help, who are their own advocates.”

A program such as Park Century’s doesn’t come cheap. Tuition is $20,000 a year, although less than half of students’ families pay the full rate on their own. About 40% of the students are referred by local school districts, which pick up a substantial amount of the cost. Some students also receive partial scholarships. Parents generally have to pay for much of the psychiatric treatment and some individual tutoring.

Other sources of income for the school are private donations and grants from corporations and foundations, including the International Foundation for Learning Disabilities, which raises funds for children with learning disabilities.

The foundation also helps the school get publicity. On March 3, 1988, the foundation arranged a visit by the Duke and Duchess of York, Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah.

Although Park Century officials do not intend to expand and have a waiting list for admission, the school has nonetheless begun an effort to raise its profile a bit, in the interest of “getting the message out to the people,” Shain said. For example, a kindergarten hot line has been set up to provide advice and suggestions to parents with children with learning disabilities. The school also has begun to offer some free preliminary tests to detect learning disabilities.

Spindler said she hopes that such programs will provide early detection of learning disabilities so children can get an early start with treatment.

With proper treatment, school officials say, other children can follow the path of 12-year-old Micah, a dyslexic who, after six years at Park Century, looks forward to his impending graduation to a mainstream school.

“When I came here, I couldn’t read, ‘The cat is outside,’ ” Micah said. “But now my favorites are Ray Bradbury and John Steinbeck.”