School Works to Uncover Troubled Students’ Hidden Talents

At first glance, the North Hollywood school looks much like any other campus. Elementary school pupils learn to count, middle school students read “Romeo and Juliet” and high school students hunch over keyboards in a computer lab.

But a closer look at the Dubnoff Center for Child Development and Educational Therapy reveals an intensive education and therapeutic program designed for 275 students ages 5 to 22 with learning, emotional and behavioral disabilities.

A number of Dubnoff students have suffered neglect, abuse and abandonment at home or on the streets, school officials said, adding that the cumulative effect has left them unable to function in traditional school settings. Most of the students live in foster homes or on campus in group homes.

Through psychiatric services, speech therapy, adaptive physical education, clinical art therapy, residential services, job training and individual, group and family counseling, the students have a last chance to bring order to their troubled lives, school officials said.

“We don’t get kids whose problems need to be nipped in the bud,” said Sandra Sternig-Babcock, the center’s president and CEO. “They are well beyond that; they are in full bloom.”

The Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign was launched to help such nonprofit programs as the Dubnoff Center, which received a $10,000 grant. The campaign gives aid to agencies serving the needy and disadvantaged across five counties in Southern California.

At Dubnoff, credentialed special education teachers and qualified instructional aides work with groups of six to 12 students to unlock their academic potential. Therapists help them work through emotional, behavioral and learning issues. The goal is to prepare students to return to traditional public or private school or enter the workforce.

School founder Belle Dubnoff championed this integrated approach to learning when she started the school in 1948 in her West Hollywood home with a handful of children deemed by society as unreachable and unteachable, Sternig-Babcock said.

“The students are here because there is a structured and nurturing therapeutic milieu,” she said. “We take in children ... who have overwhelming needs.”

The school’s Cahuenga Boulevard and Dubnoff Way campus includes an administration building, classroom buildings, a swimming pool and pool house, gymnasium, kitchen, cafeteria and residential houses.

It has an active athletic program, including competitive intramural team sports; a day camp during school vacations, and a preschool for the children of working families living in the surrounding neighborhood.

The Dubnoff Center cannot provide all that it does single-handedly, school officials said. It relies on individual, public and corporate funding as well as a volunteer corps to keep its programs operating.

As public dollars shrink and demands for services rise, Cheryl Gurin, director of resource development, said the school has become more dependent on private funds to pay for necessities such as computers, textbooks and playground equipment.

“Corporate donations in conjunction with individual gifts have made a tremendous difference in the lives of our Dubnoff students,” she said. “I see private donations playing a major role in how and what we can provide for these special-needs children in the years ahead.”

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