As discussed in part 1 of this series, starting a charter school requires great persistence. I believe that I and members of my founding team would have given up on this process years ago were it not for the hopeful parents who remind us daily about their need for our school and our own experiences as parents and learners.
Charter schools in Pennsylvania are charged with the education of traditionally under served populations as dictated by Act 22 of 1997, the charter school law of the Commonwealth. Frequently those starting charter schools are, like the kid who becomes a cop to right wrongs perpetrated against him, impelled to do so because they are part of the under served group their school is targeting. Some on our founding team, myself included, are inspired to make things right for just such an underserved group.
A school targeting children with learning disabilities
The Whole Life Charter School will be a tuition-free school designed to educate high functioning children struggling with learning disabilities, particularly Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Language Based Learning Disabilities (LBLD), and Asperger’s Syndrome (AS). Parents pre-enrolling their children talk about the repeated failure and frustration their children experience in schools that don't quite understand them and that are designed to educate their more numerous neurologically “normal” students. I am dismayed that nearly 40 years after I graduated from high school in what were the dark ages in our understanding of learning disabilities, these parents relate stories about their children’s school experiences that are so similar to my own. I was one of those children, too.
I have good memories of kindergarten and my kindergarten teacher. She was tall and pretty and nice and she let me be the ring master in the circus show that we put on for our parents. We could play in kindergarten, eat snacks, go out to recess two or three times each day and be kids. Kindergarten was fun and it was the first and last really great year I ever had in public school.
First grade proved to be somewhat more challenging. My motors were constantly running and I was endlessly in motion. My hands tapped, my feet wiggled, my knees bounced up and down whenever I was confined to my seat. I remember trying to keep still by asking the kid sitting in his chair in front of me to push his chair back hard against the front of my desk. I'd then ask the kid behind me to push the front of her desk hard into the back of my chair. My hope was that together they would somehow clamp me into my seat.
Despite reading at a level five years more advanced than my grade, my grades were tumbling by my third year in public school. Intending to stem the avalanche of bad reports cards, my mother took me to see a psychiatrist. Her name is Dr. Robbins. Despite Dr. Robbins’ best efforts my grades continued to decline and my behavior worsened in class. When sixth grade rolled around my teacher, Mr. Rothman, told my parents that he saw no evidence of my intelligence whatsoever despite the fact that my advanced reading scores placed me in the same foreign language classes as all the smart kids which I obviously was not. Mr. Rothman’s assessment of me was truly deflating but nothing hurt as much as when he pulled me from the school crossing guard program. Wearing that florescent orange harness and shiny metal badge, carrying that stop sign, and that genuine feeling of pride that came with being helpful is my only pleasant memory of a sixth grade that I otherwise fared poorly in at best.
Seventh, eighth and ninth grades went by in a blur. It was the late sixties and students were staging sit-ins to oppose the Vietnam war at my junior high school. I took part in these protests not because I had a strong reaction to the horrors in Vietnam but rather because it was an excuse to get out of class. I felt pretty stupid most of the time and was rarely prepared with homework or book reports. I became a much more serious disciplinary problem in both public and Hebrew school where i was known for shooting rubber bands not at other students but at the backs of my teachers while they wrote on the blackboards. Largely at odds with and marginalized by my peer group, I had only two friends, both of whom were equally eschewed by our classmates.
I had been analyzed by Dr. Robbins for a 50 minute hour every Wednesday at 4:00 PM for over five years by the time I entered my first year of high school. During those years she guessed I was victim to a parade of brain based disorders including Minimal Brain Dysfunction (MBD), dyslexia, and hyperactivity among others as there was no clear diagnosis for what seemed to be my problem. The year was 1970. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder wasn't even ghost text in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) at the time and without a diagnosis there was little treatment to recommend other than hours and hours of conversation.
Three classes kept me going to school in tenth grade: Art class, English class and Speech/Theatre class. The school’s vice principal gave me a permanent pass which allowed me to leave any class whenever the spirit moved. Once out of class I was permitted to stroll through the halls or fill the bird feeders in the school’s center courtyard. The vice principal most likely allowed this more to protect my teachers and their classrooms from my disruptions rather than to give me an opportunity to release some of my energy.
In eleventh grade, I was cutting just about any class that came before homeroom at 9:30 AM because I usually went to sleep at 4:00 am and couldn't wake up in time to catch the 7:00 AM bus for class starting only 20 minutes later. Theatre, and art, still held my attention enough to keep me going to school. I also won the comic lead in the school’s musical production, South Pacific, that year which insured my attendance at least in the afternoon classes. Dr. Robbins and I developed some ideas that often helped me manage my in-class hyperactivity. We leveraged my penchant for art and my love of hand work and directed it into the creation of leather shoes and boots of my own design. The school allowed me to sew this foot ware together in any class I cared to. Passing a thick steel sewing needle through several layers of leather took great physical effort and occupied me in a way that still allowed me to listen to, and take part in, the lectures and discussion. (This, by the way, is something I doubt a kid could get away with nowadays because sewing leather requires sewing needles and sewing needles would be considered a weapon at many schools).
I somehow managed to get to the first semester of twelfth grade. Once there, I was meeting school on many of my own terms which means that I was technically absent more days than I wa that year because I figured out that they couldn't discipline me for cutting if I was absent and they couldn't fail me in the remaining classes if I showed up for them. I failed every one of my first period classes since tenth grade which somehow never inspired the school to start me at a later time despite my repeated requests.
The traditional teaching method employed at the time was no match for my uncontrollable energy. School simply did not work for me. As I stumbled and failed my way through much of it I was left only with a diminished sense of ability and self esteem (despite the fact that I won the schools’ Excellence in Theatre award for that year which I, sadly, wasn't present to collect at at the graduation ceremony having failed both senior English and Social Studies).
Thirty two years after I graduated from high school I became a 9th grade computer teacher at a private high school for girls. No later than the first day of orientation at my new job was I involved in a discussion about returning students for whom our traditional style of education was failing. There was Whitney who by ninth grade had a disciplinary history that rivaled my own as a student. "The Two Jenns" were two girls who I later discovered cheating via text message during a test I was giving (they forgot to silence their phones). “Jenn 1” was also known to attempt escape from her middle school classes by crawling along the floor towards the rear door of the classroom as her teachers scrawled on the board at the front. Megan was an incredibly bright girl who was bottoming out in her classes. She proved her smarts by constructing a scavenger hunt in which she set up a pathway of user accounts I was to log into, each holding a clue to the next site on which one of the accounts had been activated. She told me that if I wanted to see her homework assignment I had to scavenge to the end of the path. After an hour of searching through some of the most creative uses of the internet I have ever witnessed to date, I discovered her perfectly completed assignment. Her brilliance and creativity was neither appreciated nor terribly obvious in other classes.
I chose to build this charter school because children need a school that does more than meets the minimum legal guidelines (and economic outlay) for the education of children that struggle. We need a school that is structured to respond to the very real physical and emotional needs of children struggling with ADHD or Asperger’s Syndorme in addition to their academic requirements. Let's build a school for the child who needs coaching in interpersonal relationships, as children with Asperger's and ADHD often do and that provides such coaching when a child falls out of sorts with a classmate or friend. Let's experiment with ways to teach every subject as actively as we can imagine for hyperactive kids who need to move by thinking differently about classroom instruction, classroom seating, or maybe even thinking differently about what makes a classroom itself. Let's be honest and realize that a child who builds bicycles in her sleep, tears through books and magazines on bicycle construction and mechanics, but won't touch Shakespeare with a ten foot poll will probably choose a career that leverages her mechanical ability and visual creativity. She will probably not become an English teacher no matter how many Sonnets she is required to read.
I am the parent of a child with a learning disability and have been the teacher of many children who struggled because of a neurological makeup that causes their brains to fire in patterns dissimilar to those of their more uniform peers. As a student who struggled through school because of my own disabilities I am admittedly still licking the wounds of my youth.
My hope, and the hope of my founding team, is that we will build a school that will lessen the pain for those children with learning differences who are struggling academically despite their best efforts, are being marginalized by their peers, and who are trying to grow into accomplished adults as their self esteem withers.
In Part 3 of this series I will outline some of the roadblocks we have been challenged with that are not generally discussed in manuals offering information on starting a charter school.
