High Life A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Normal Day at Far From Normal School

Maximum class size of 12 students . . . class officers who organize strong activities . . . a 4-H club . . . Friday activities that attract the entire student body. . . .

The stuff of any public school administrator’s dream. But at Jordan Secondary Learning Center in Garden Grove, this dream is a reality.

“The school itself is not different,” said Bill Langan, Jordan Center principal. “It’s different in the clients we’re working with.”

The Jordan Center is a school for autistic and developmentally disabled students between the ages of 14 and 22.

“There is a curriculum guide. The students are given specific tasks to complete and specific learning responsibilities that they must complete.”

Students are taught reading at about the second- or third-grade level, and writing, math and vocational skills.

“It’s a well-rounded program,” said teacher Vivian Taggart, a four-year veteran of the school, which opened in 1966 and is operated by the Garden Grove Unified School District.

The campus has eight classrooms, two of which are used for classes for autistic students and two of which are multipurpose rooms. There are 72 students and seven teachers.

Each teacher has students with similar learning levels in each class, and the instructor’s educational approach is determined by the students’ abilities.

A typical day begins with students arriving about 8:45 a.m. and classes starting at 9. Students receive their writing assignment, which includes writing the day’s date, and perhaps a happy birthday wish to a fellow classmate or teacher or something about the day’s upcoming activities.

At some point during the day, all students take part in exercise done to music. Once a week, a teacher of adaptive physical education visits the campus, as does a speech therapist.

And also at least once a week, the students venture beyond the campus boundaries. They usually limit these field trips to across the street to the Target store to learn to use pay phones, to fast-food restaurants to practice ordering food, or to specific properties to learn gardening.

Many students have learned food words and survival words--such as emergency exit-- just for their trips. Taggart’s class also makes occasional visits to a bank, where the students have savings accounts.

“I remember one embarrassing incident when the OCTD buses had just started running,” said teacher Gail Santiago, who has been with the Jordan Center since its beginning. “A group of students went on a field trip. One of them was in a wheelchair. When the trip was over, we took them off the bus and on our way back to school we realized that we had left the boy in the wheelchair back at the bus stop.”

The teachers agree that the most rewarding moments come when they see their students placed in jobs and living their own lives.

“That means we’ve made them as independent as possible,” Taggart said. “Looking at their faces when they understand something, they’re so appreciative it’s extremely rewarding.”

Come June, Jordan Center will look like any other high school campus, populated by happy graduates.

“We do have a graduation ceremony on campus,” Langan said, “where all the parents and care-providers come and the students are recognized and given a diploma and trophies for special attendance and those types of things.

“Our responsibility after graduation is to help them in the transition,” he added.

Said Santiago: “Regional Center, a county-run program to take care of the handicapped, will usually place the higher-functioning students in some kind of workshop with further training towards working independently. But the others will probably end up in a workshop.”

Langan said many students have been placed in jobs after graduation because of the school’s vocational education program.

“We let the parents and care-providers know that these things are out there available to the students,” Langan said.

“We have one student going over to a bookstore and working there for a couple of hours a week. Rosario, who is one of our higher-functioning students, did such a super job through the work program, the store has asked her to come back and work an hour or two a day for pay.”

A handful of Jordan Center students are employed through Goodwill, while others have jobs at McDonald’s, the Special Olympics office and Westbrook Royale Residential Care Home in Garden Grove.

“We have a real strong community-based program,” Langan said. “Our autistic classes are off campus a great deal. They travel throughout the community, learning how to work within it.

“Many of our other students are sent out individually. They go out into the community and learn how to grocery shop, how to order food, how to sit together in a restaurant and eat together as a group.”

The Jordan Center’s goal is “maximum independence.”

“Maximum for each student, according to his or her level,” Santiago said. “Some will end up in workshop, others will end up in regular jobs, and that’s what we want.”

Amy Johnson is a freshman at Katella High School, where she is a reporter for the school newspaper, Excalibur, president of the freshman class and head of the freshman cheerleaders.