Starting Something Special

Through preschool, Delia Smith’s son mingled with other children and received the attention he needed for a disability that distorts his visual perception, making subjects such as mathematics difficult, and puts him at high risk of a heart attack.

When 7-year-old Daniel entered first grade, Smith feared he would be placed in a special-education bungalow isolated from children in mainstream classes.

“I went to half a dozen private schools and half a dozen public schools, and I was told politely, ‘We just don’t have anything for that kind of student,’ ” said Smith, whose son suffers from Williams syndrome, a congenital disorder that affects brain and physical development. “That’s why I was part of the group that urged them to start the school.”

That school is expected to become a reality in September.

Cal State Northridge and the CHIME Institute for Children With Special Needs plan to open a charter school focusing on students with learning and physical disabilities. Officials anticipate that one in five students at the kindergarten through third grade campus will have some type of disability. The school plans to add grade levels each year, up to eighth grade.

It would be among a handful of publicly funded schools of its type in Los Angeles, which all have waiting lists, educators said.

Smith and other parents, whose children had been in CHIME’s infant program at Washington Mutual headquarters in Chatsworth and its preschool program on the Northridge campus, began a campaign to get a publicly funded school operating under its own charter rules rather than under the Los Angeles Unified School District’s administration.

CSUN’s administration has endorsed plans for the school, but the LAUSD school board must still approve the charter.

Until then, Daniel is enrolled in Valley Community Charter School in North Hills, a school in its first year of integrating special-needs children into classrooms with other children.

Smith plans to transfer him and a daughter who attends the CHIME preschool to the charter school when it opens in the fall, citing the staff’s experience.

Co-directors Claire Cavallaro and Michele Haney wrote a 416-page guide published in 1999 on preschool programs. Cavallaro, chairman of CSUN’s department of special education and president of the CHIME Institute, said the school will follow the model established by the preschool and CSUN’s acclaimed deaf studies program.

All the charter school’s teachers will be required to learn American Sign Language, and the curriculum will be molded to accommodate students with various types of disabilities, from speech impediments to autism.

Speech and physical therapists will be on staff to work one-on-one with students.

“Part of the key is that each child will have different goals and objectives,” Cavallaro said. “If a child’s disability is severe and he will never learn to read, his goals may be different than someone reading before kindergarten. He may be working on survival skills or just getting along with other students.”

The school would receive the same state funding per student as public schools, but planners are seeking about $500,000 in donations to train teachers and therapists and to buy highly specialized equipment, such as a playground designed for children with physical limitations, Cavallaro said. They also have started a campaign to raise $6 million to build a school on or near the CSUN campus.

Educators will teach children who are just learning how to put a sentence together to socialize with classmates who have to crawl from place to place or who speak only in guttural utterances.

“Kids can be mean,” said Jodi Surtees, mother of Jesse, a preschooler with mild cerebral palsy. “When I was in high school, we very rarely saw children who had disabilities. So when we did, they often were defending themselves from people cutting them down.”

Parent Elsa Lewis said part of the secret to immersing special-needs children in general population classrooms is in masking their therapies, one of the benefits of the CHIME Institute’s relationship with CSUN’s College of Education. For example, a teacher’s aide studying special education at Northridge helps Lewis’ daughter, Amy, strengthen her grip with Play-Doh while everyone else in the class is playing with the clay.

“Nobody looks better or worse because they’re all playing,” Lewis said.

Lewis, herself a former special-education teacher, said she moved to Northridge to be close to the CHIME Institute preschool.

For the program to be successful, it must teach the non-disabled student to see beyond others’ disabilities, Surtees said.

“If they can ask the questions adults are uncomfortable asking, and see that we all have some disability but that’s OK, we can change the world as we know it,” she said.