With a flourish suitable for framing and filming, Park Century School of West L.A. staged an elaborate groundbreaking on Friday afternoon that brought abbreviated Landmark Street to life as it never has breathed before.
A splash of color, a wide dash of class and gifts for every man, woman and child in the crowd of perhaps 200, a glistening yellow hard-hat with Park Century’s image vividly imprinted.
Beneath a gigantic canvas that seemed almost large enough to span the bleachers in Dodger Stadium, the 40-year-old school that serves children with learning disabilities landed with a regal fanfare in technicolor, befitting the Heart of Screenland.
A Hat for Everyone
The hundreds who turned out for the ceremony included a bevy of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen as well as Park Century’s 63 high-spirited students, chaperoned by their teachers, all of whom were outfitted for easy recognition in color-coded tee-shirts.
Production was the key. When the school’s Co-Director, Genny Shain, led off the program, she was artfully ushered to the podium by (recorded) martial music and cheering.
Awhile later when Co-Director Gail Spindler arced a shovel into the dirt at 3939 Landmark, it was symbolic because the school will not actually be moving into a new ground-up building.
With crossed fingers and a small lump of hesitation in their throats, school officials expect to open the autumn term next September in a large and splendid new home on Culver City’s latest campus.
After 25 years at 2040 Stoner Ave., which the school has outgrown by 50 percent, Park Century students actually will be moving into a 37,000-square-foot warehouse that is being renovated.
New Neighbors
Long before they knew they were going to become the neighbor of Les Surfas of Surfas Food Service Design, Equipment and Supply on Landmark, school officials act lined up the property just off Washington Boulevard. They closed escrow four years ago.
But between fulfilling regulatory requirements and a false start with a previous construction company, Park Century fell a little behind its moving schedule.
Construction was scheduled to launch in the summer of ’06. But a “falling-out” with the original contractor led to a year’s delay.
The school serves students from Grades 2 through 8, and projects that its new campus — “gradually” — will accommodate a student body of 120, twice the present size.
Arthur Hoyle, the school’s Director of Development, explained that Park Century was founded in 1968 with one parent and a single student. “The student had a learning disability, and the family could not get the kind of services they felt the child needed,” Mr. Hoyle said. “So they started their own school.”
Question: What is distinctive about Park Century?
“The clinical and academic model they employ. There are two components to the program. One is teaching the children how to cope with a learning disability because a learning disability never goes away. It is a neurobiological condition.
“L.D. children and L.D. adults have a different brain configuration than people who do not have L.D. They have strengths that other people don’t have and they have weaknesses other people don’t have.
“There is an academic program that teaches them how to cope with, to manage the disability. An important component is self-advocacy, being able to explain to people who may not understand learning disabilities what a learning disability is, why they need accommodations such as calculators for math, computers for note-taking and so on.”
Q. What is it that public schools don’t understand or are unable to accommodate with learning disabled students?
“Public schools are under a lot of pressures in the special ed field where a private school like ours is not. First, they have larger populations in the classroom than we have. We have 12 students, maximum, in a classroom with two teachers.
“In addition, all students have a tutor that they spend about 20 minutes a day with, getting help with their work. So we have an extremely low student-teacher ratio, basically 2 to 1. Public schools just cannot devote that kind of manpower to a group of students. They don’t have the resources.”
Q. Is the emphasis on the greater intensity that a private school is able to apply?
“Another dimension to the program is — I mentioned the clinical and academic sides — the clinical side. This has to do with dealing with the child’s emotional makeup, how they feel about themselves because they have a learning disability. The students may have had unpleasant experiences in a mainstream school when they started out, before people realized they had a learning disability.
“Sometimes the disability does not show itself until a child has failed in school for two or three years. There may be various explanations and various remedies that are tried before a learning disability diagnosis is made. During that time, a child has been failing in school, perhaps has been the butt of humor from peers and his self-esteem has plummeted. He may have become school-phobic.
“So this is an emotional component to the problem that our school addresses in a number of ways. We don’t even bring (new students) into a classroom until they are comfortable in their new environment, until they are receptive to learning again. Typically, this would be a matter of weeks. They have games, and they have getting-to-know-you, making them comfortable, settling them in, making the parents comfortable that their child is in the right place. Parents, naturally, have come to us with a lot of anxiety about their child.”
Q. Is a stigma attached to this disability or not because it is not physically evident?
“It is a hidden disability. If they are just L.D., they may not exhibit any symptoms that would show them, in any way, to be unlike any other child. Unless they have Attention Deficit Disorder as well, which occurs in about 15 percent of kids with L.D., then the impulsivity, the distractibility, that is kind of a tipoff the child has that issue as well.
“Other than that, these kids are completely normal looking. So it is kind of a silent problem.”
Q. Is that a help or hindrance?
“A hindrance because if you are not trained in it, you start to make judgmental observations rather than a clinical evaluation of the problem, such as ‘the child is not doing his homework’ or he is not trying.’”
Q. Does this mean, commonly, a child would be in school before a learning disability is recognized?
“Absolutely. Although we start at Grade 2, we do a lot of outreach in the community, in mainstream schools, to try to alert teachers and administrators to some of the warning signs for L.D. so we can get kids earlier. “
Q. Does it work?
“It does. We have been doing open houses for private and public school teachers and administrators to come in and kind of get L.D. 101 from our staff. They are receptive. Our new school in Culver City will have a Community Outreach Center, which will be an expansion of that. People will just come in off the street and get information.
“We also will offer workshops, seminars and educational programs for professional educators to help them spot the L.D. student in their class earlier on.”
Q. You said Park Century eventually will be doubling its enrollment. What does “eventually” mean?
“In doubling from about 60 students to about 120 over time. It will be incremental, about 10 students a year, because we don’t want to flood the school with a lot of new students. That would be chaotic. We will go up to 70 in January at our current location, and then up to ’80 for the fall of ’08.
Mr. Hoyle smiled at the mention of a projected schedule.
“We should open here in September, according to the promise of our contractor.
“Menawhile, one of the things we want to do is build more bridges to the public school system. Sometimes that can be sensitive for a private school to be saying ‘We have things to teach you.’ Public school folks are not excited about hearing that message.
“We do think it is about the children, about catching them early. The sooner they are caught, the sooner the get into a remediating program. The happier they will be. The less stress they will experience.”
Q. Are there signs parents of pre-school children should look for?
“A lot of people try to teach their pre-school children to read. If they see the child is having a lot of trouble decoding words or is scrambling the alphabet, turning things around, those are signs.
“We have a website that offers a great deal of information, www.parkcenturyschool.org. The site has a Resource button. Anyone can click on it. We have a long list of links that will take you to websites in the professional L.D. community with information about how to get a diagnosis, how to get tested, where to go for help.”
See the website for further information on Park Century School, where the tuition is $41,000 annually.
