‘Disabled’ Puppets Lend a Hand : Volunteers: The program answers questions and makes children more comfortable about their disabilities or those of classmates.

The sight of the 3-foot-tall puppet wearing crutches and leg braces prompts many questions from the children.

“Do your legs hurt?”

“How’d you get it?”

“Did you catch spina bifida, or did you have it when you were born?”

The questions are from a group of about 75 fourth-graders at Palm Crest Elementary School in La Canada Flintridge. But when the puppet’s adult operator, Kris Clark, replies, she lets “Valerie” do the talking.

Valerie is a large puppet for which Clark provides voice and movement. They are both part of the “Kids on the Block” program. Together with a group of about a dozen volunteers from the Women’s Council of Verdugo Hills Hospital and Foundation, they are helping schoolchildren make friends with disabled students in their Foothill-area classrooms.

“This program makes it much more comfortable for everyone,” said Clark, a housewife who is co-chairwoman of the local group. She is not handicapped but has an 8-year-old daughter with spina bifida, a spinal birth disorder that cripples the legs. She said the program helps the schoolchildren and their disabled classmates understand that their similarities outnumber their differences.

Clark and the “Kids on the Block” characters have been visiting local schools two or three times a month for the past three years. Clark said the volunteers and their colorful puppets, which depict specific disabilities, perform for groups of about 60.

The puppets are about the size of a 3-year-old child and are expensive--$700 to $1,200. Part of the expense lies in the special accessories, such as Valerie’s crutches and leg braces.

Mark, the puppet whose character has cerebral palsy, is the most expensive because he wears a helmet and rides in a working wheelchair, which he calls his “cruiser.” Last year, the Montrose Verdugo Chamber of Commerce held a charity baseball game and raised $1,000 to buy Mark a new one.

Clark said the deaf puppet, Renaldo Rodriguez, is about the size of a 4-year-old child and takes two people to operate, one moving the puppet’s hands in sign language as he speaks.

The setup is simple. The puppets appear in pairs, each depicting a child. One of them has a physical handicap. But each pair includes one non-disabled character who breaks the ice by asking the partner about the disability. After a few minutes they invite youngsters in the audience to talk with them.

Clark said the kids want to know how the disability affects the character’s daily life. They ask Valerie how she climbs to the top bunk bed--she uses a special ladder or gets help from her family, she replies--and how she gets dressed in the morning, and whether she can go to Disneyland.

“It’s so important for them to be able to ask questions,” said Alyce Russell, who operates Mark, the character with cerebral palsy. “That breaks down the barrier. That’s something Mark allows them to do.”

When one child asked Mark, “Does it hurt to have cerebral palsy,” the character replied: “Not so much on the outside; but sometimes it hurts when kids make fun of me.”

Fielding the youngsters’ questions is not as difficult as it might seem, Clark said.

“It’s perfectly acceptable for you to say, ‘I don’t know,’ ” said Clark, “because the puppets are kids.” Clark said some of the youngsters surprise her with their insight.

“One person asked me, ‘Did your mom know before you were born?’ ” said Clark. “That’s a real relevant question for the ‘90s.”

It is also a particularly poignant question for Clark, whose daughter Katharine has spina bifida.

“One of the biggest mistakes we make as a society is labeling,” she said.

Most of the questions are predictable, and Clark said the program’s video and audiotape training materials provide the puppeteers with responses for most of them. Clark said unexpected questions are rare because the parent organization, which writes out the scripts for the characters, has heard them all before.

The “Kids on the Block” program, which has its headquarters in Maryland, was started in 1977 by Barbara Aiello, a special education teacher and former editor of Teaching Exceptional Children.

Aiello had worked closely with a boy who has cerebral palsy, getting him ready to be enrolled in a regular classroom. A few weeks after the boy enrolled, he told Aiello he didn’t want to go to school anymore. Aiello found the biggest problem was that other kids in his class had not been prepared to receive him. They were embarrassed by his handicap and just did not understand his needs.

Aiello started the “Kids on the Block” as an education program using puppets to break down barriers and reach young people before they had formed biases.

“We target the fourth grade,” said Russell, “because it seems to be the year that children really start noticing differences and start choosing peer groups and cliques.”

In the scripted skits, puppets give a kids-eye view of specific disabilities, then invite questions from the audience.

The whimsical humor in the sketches and the puppets’ matter-of-fact characterizations are important features of the program. The laughter helps overcome embarrassment for both the children and the puppeteers.

In Clark’s sketch, Valerie wants to try out for the cheerleader squad and has fastened a colorful pompon to one of her crutches. Her friend, Joanne, tells her she doesn’t see how she can be a cheerleader wearing leg braces. But Valerie shows Joanne that she can lead the cheer, and even teaches her a new one.

The Glendale group got its start when the Pasadena Junior League donated 10 puppets to Verdugo Hills Hospital.

“They just literally gave us those puppets,” said Alison Carlson, the program’s co-chairwoman. “That’s how we got started. The hospital paid for us to have the training.”

This spring the Glendale program is in need of some new recruits, according to Clark. Several of the puppeteers are taking new jobs, creating a need for new volunteers.

Clark and Valerie have made several appearances at Palm Crest Elementary School. An agreement between three local school districts places a high proportion of disabled students there. Thirty-six of the school’s 512 students this year are severely handicapped, according to principal Don Hingst.

When Hingst came to the newly reopened school in September, 1988, he invited the “Kids on the Block.” He said the children were very moved by the program, and quickly took an active, participatory role in looking after the special kids.

“To observe the care and the love and the understanding that our children have for the very special kids is something to behold,” he said. “They love them,” he said, and the acceptance goes both ways. “We have seen marked improvement in the behaviors of the special children, because they have a good role model.”

“This is really helping children to see and accept differences among ourselves,” said Susan Rosen, a third- and fourth-grade teacher at Palm Crest. She said her students often volunteer to spend extra time working with disabled students, even giving up their own physical education time to help them on the playground.

“So many of my children were wanting to help,” she said, “I finally had to get a sign-up sheet. We had to limit it to three or four a day.”

Most of the youngsters learn from the program, and say it has helped them grow closer to their disabled peers, she said.

“It was fun,” said Nicole Mertz, a fourth-grade student at Palm Crest who saw the “Kids on the Block” for the first time in March. Mertz said she and other children in her class have taken some of the disabled students under their care, helping them with the computer.

A strong emotional link seems to spring up between the characters and their human counterparts, said to Russell.

“Now little Mark is like a part of our family,” she said, adding that her children talk to the puppet at home. When he is not performing, Mark is supposed to ride in a big blue carrying sack. But, Russell said, the puppet has become so much like a real member of her family that “I can’t put him in his bag.”