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Subject: Special Ed, Made Extra Special; Sally Smith, Life of the Lab School, Revels in
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 05:41:19 EST
Message-ID: <27.1992Nov9.054120@AmeriCast.com>

Special Ed, Made Extra Special; Sally Smith, Life of the Lab
School, Revels in Her 25-Year RunBy Elizabeth Kastor<Washington
Post Staff Writer=

 Here, open a door. Look.

 In this room a boy is building a chair. In that room half-a-
dozen 6-year-olds are wrapped in fake fur, sitting around an ima-
ginary fire and talking about cave men. Upstairs, a class, making
papier-mache volcanoes, greets visitors in Japanese. Downstairs,
a boy shows off a clay figure ready to star in an animated movie.
Outside, miniature knights and ladies unroll 231 feet of toilet
paper to illustrate the length of the Bayeux Tapestry. Nearby two
boys race on three-wheeled carts.

 They are learning about organization and planning by building
chairs, about prehistory by becoming cave men, about space and
measurement by unrolling toilet paper, about balance and physical
control by racing carts.

  Nothing astonishing appears to be happening. But ask the
parents of these kids and they will tell you that over time,
something astonishing is happening. Their kids are learning.

 This is the Lab School of Washington, and the children are here
because they could not learn anywhere else. The students at the
Lab School are all severely learning disabled - not retarded, not
emotionally disturbed, but thwarted by some mysterious neurologi-
cal glitch that can keep them from being able to read or subtract
or concentrate or understand time or space the ways most kids do.
They do not have "simple" dyslexia, the reading problem that has
become almost a cliche in recent years, but more complicated webs
of problems that can ultimately distort behavior and relation-
ships.

 The school is now 25 years old and will celebrate the anniver-
sary at a fund-raiser tonight.  While there are other programs
around for people with learning disabilities, the Lab School's
inventive curriculum, which is rooted in the arts, is nationally
and internationally known. Both the school and its founder and
director, Sally Smith, manage to garner the kind of praise and
attention that float through the dreams of PR flacks. Parents
talk about the school in voices laced with an almost unseemly
gratitude. It saved us, they insist, which says a great deal not
only about the school but also about the pain of living with a
child who seems smart but cannot make change or turn a few pieces
of Lego into a car.

 "If you were stuck on the Titanic and all the lifeboats were
gone and somebody came along and gave you a hand, you would talk
about it from now until doomsday," says board member Garry Clif-
ford, Washington bureau chief for People magazine and a former
Lab School parent. "And that's how we feel." Sally Smith walks
into a room and unleashes chaos. Two radios begin blaring on dif-
ferent stations. A video plays on the TV, flashing color and
roaring sound.  Lights flick on, off, on. Venetian blinds
flutter.

 And  then she starts to dictate. Holding up five flash cards
with obscure scientific words, words with lots of Xs and Ys and
Zs, she tells her audience to write the words down, study them
for a moment, and then, with the air still jangling with noise
and light, turn the paper over and spell each word correctly.

 No one can do it.  It is impossible to pay attention, impossible
to hear, impossible to think, impossible not to want to scream,
"Stop!"

 She has made her point. "This is what our kids feel all the
time," she says. It is a powerful grabbing of the emotional la-
pels typical of a woman who has dedicated herself to the people
she always calls "our kids."

 But in the late '60s, as far as Smith was concerned, there was
only one of those kids and he was her youngest son. Gary seemed
smart and creative but, long after he should have, could neither
read nor understand what two plus two made. He had been very sick
as a baby and Smith and the foreign-service officer who was then
her husband had fought to keep him alive. Now she would begin to
fight to get him educated.

"It wasn't too long ago when we either warehoused kids with spe-
cial learning needs or sort of relegated them to the back of the
classroom, where they received very little attention," says
Charles Tesconi, dean of the American University School of Educa-
tion, where Smith, 63, is now director of the Learning Disabili-
ties graduate program. But beginning in the '70s, public aware-
ness grew. "To the extent that Sally's program in some ways
predated all that attention is a tribute to her."

 Back in the '60s, Smith had to rely on her own observations and
intuition. She studied how her son learned best - by acting
things out, through storytelling rather than through lecture -
and created a school that would teach him that way. "What I
didn't know at that time but I know now," Smith says, "is that
with delayed development of the central nervous system they stay
in a concrete stage much longer. They need to touch it and hear
it and even sometimes taste it to learn it."

 She began by creating a system of ascending "clubs" in which the
elementary school kids spent a part of each day and through which
they learned history and anthropology and geography. First came
the Cave Club for the kids who, in another school, would have
been in first or second grade. "Six-year-olds are primitive any-
way," she thought. "Put them in the cave."

 Each club has an opening ritual and meets in a thematically
decorated room. The rituals provide order. The rooms intrigue the
imagination. There is also more traditional work time, when stu-
dents hunch over work sheets or type into computers. Each child
(boys, who are more prone to learning disabilities, make up the
large majority at the school) has his own individual study plan,
classes have fewer than a dozen students, and there are several
teachers in each room.

  This, of course, is not a cheap way to educate a child. The
tuition at the nonprofit school is between $14,000 and $15,000 a
year, but 80 percent of the students have their tuition paid by
the District, Maryland and Virginia school districts. A law
passed by Congress in 1975 requires school districts to provide
appropriate education for disabled students; to get the aid,
parents must prove in court their school district cannot ade-
quately educate their children.

That process requires a measure of diligence, and sometimes mo-
ney, from parents, and no doubt places the Lab School beyond the
practical reach of many. But Smith says not only the rich reach
her school, that her student body includes children from a
variety of backgrounds, one-third of them minorities.

 In 25 years the school has grown from a three-student annex of
the Kingsbury Center, an education and testing program, to an in-
stitution with 250 day-students, a tutoring program that reaches
another 250 kids and adults, a summer camp, a night school and a
testing service, all housed on a scenic campus perched on a hill
above Reservoir Road NW. Most students spend four to five years
at the school, almost all graduate from high school, and about 90
percent go on to college. Smith has written two books about
learning disabilities, and the school is now selling its educa-
tional products and hosting seminars.

 To walk through the halls of the Lab School with Smith is to
race behind black pumps that clatter up stairs at ankle-breaking
speed.  Teachers attach themselves to her for a moment as she
passes, and she answers them in a booming voice, the sort of
voice that would belong to a Mack truck that had grown up in New
York.

  Sally Smith is the Lab School. Although she praises her staff
to the proverbial skies and has many accomplished deputies, she
is involved in every corner of the school with the semi-
tyrannical passion of a visionary. Trained in modern dance,
psychology and cultural anthropology, not education, she created
the place from nothing, enlisting artist friends to teach, en-
listing others to donate money, dreaming up its innovative curri-
culum in a few hours.

 A short, solid woman, she wraps herself in dramatic sweaters and
scarves and oversized, eccentric jewelry. Sometimes brusque,
sometimes melting with warmth, she is given to laughing with af-
fection about the absurdities of her chosen work (she loves it
that the obscene graffiti in the school's bathrooms is inevitably
misspelled) and trails behind her a cloud of fierce, slightly
chaotic energy.

 "It helps that I'm a little hyperactive," Smith says, indulging
in what people experienced with learning disabilities call "LD
humor."

 The annual fund-raising dinner centers on a savvy public rela-
tions concept: Give awards to a handful of famous, powerful and
successful people who happen to have learning disabilities, and
the cameras and guests will follow. The more noted honorees have
included Cher, Tom Cruise, Harry Belafonte, Greg Louganis,
Oscar-winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim.

This year, the dinner will also honor Smith herself.

 "I find that very uncomfortable," Smith says edgily. "I find it
much more comfortable giving honors. I'm an action person. I like
doing."



 When Dan Swartzendruber first visited the Lab School, he
thought, "This is a retard's school and I don't want to go here."
But the junior high student had been failing in a variety of
private and public schools, and after years of frustration had
finally been diagnosed as having attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder. "I felt what most people feel when they're diagnosed as
learning disabled," he says now. "I tried to refuse to believe
it."

 Five years later, Swartzendruber is a senior at the school and
president of the student body. Next year he plans to attend a
college with a strong learning disabilities support program. He
is no longer "in denial," as he puts it, but both parents and
kids who find their way to the Lab School know what that denial
feels like. Although many are relieved finally to have a name for
an amorphous and intractable problem, there is inevitable pain
over not having a "perfect" child, about leaving the world of
"normal" schools and "normal" kids. These are the people who do
not laugh at the LD humor, who do not make eye contact with other
parents, who drop their kids off and want the school to "fix it."

 But eventually the comfort of being among people who understand
soothes most abraded egos. "When you have a child like this,
there's a lot of advance work you have to do," says Wendy Wigtil,
whose 10-year-old son cannot understand everything that is said
to him and has trouble filtering out minor distractions.

 "If your child is going to a birthday party and you know he's
very sensitive to loud noises and you know there are going to be
blowing horns, you have to go to the parent and say, 'If so-and-
so acts this way, it might be because of this.' You're constantly
setting the stage for your kid. Parents who have their kids
there, they just breathe a sigh of relief because anyone who has
a child at the Lab School understands what those issues are. They
all understand the frustrations and the sadness that is part of
that."

 That buzzword of the '90s, "self-esteem," buzzes frequently
around the Lab School, the collective assumption being that the
learning disabled have survived lifetimes of derision. They are
taught to be their own "advocates," to explain their problems
without shame, to ask for what they need. And behind them, of
course, stands their strongest advocate, Sally Smith.

 At one recent seminar for night school students, Smith went
around the room asking each of the dozen adults if he or she had
been mocked or labeled stupid. Some gave examples, but one after
another, they minimized the shame and seemed less traumatized
than proud of the stratagems they had adopted over the years to
circumvent their problems. Were they, perhaps, in denial? Or just
shy about displaying their wounds in public? Or perhaps their
self-esteem is not dented?

 One father of a Lab School teenager wonders whether the school
excessively emphasizes self-image.

 "The psychologists and counselors and teachers are all trained
to deal with bright children who are frustrated and in many cases
have low self-esteem," he says, "and sometimes I think people shy
away from being too tough with the children, in case their egos
are too fragile."

 As his child masters the manipulative skills of adolescence, he
worries that the Lab School may not be strict enough with its
older students, that the junior high and high school students
could benefit from a little more discipline, a little more resis-
tance to their clever attempts to get out of work and bend the
rules.

 But, he says, "all the criticisms I have, I want to emphasize,
are given in the context of saying the school has been a li-
fesaver."

 For Sally Smith, the school has been more than a lifesaver, it
has been her life. "I really thought I'd stay for two years, get
it going," she says now. "I just got excited by it."

 Her son Gary, who finally learned to read at 14 and is now in
his early thirties, has gone on to work with children himself. He
and his mother remain close, but he has always chosen to stay out
of her limelight. Asked through his mother whether he will speak
to a reporter, he relays only this comment: "Tell her I gave you
your career."

 And that, Smith says with a bark of laughter, is true.<<

04:49 11-09C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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