Second in a series.
Re: “Enid Wizig and ‘No Limits’ – 2 Works of Art”
For those with impaired, or even nonexistent, hearing, eyes are their most sensitive and necessary organ.
No Limits for Deaf Children, an ambitiously imaginative after-school program for dozens of Culver City students, students, represents a pitch-perfect marriage of extraordinary accommodation for those who see life from the depths of their little-understood soundless world.
When you rise to the second floor of the Downtown Chase Bank building, across from the Kirk Douglas Theatre, the home of No Limits greets you with a refreshing, symphonic, cymbals-clashing splash of vivid color schemes designed to make the most bashful child comfortable.
A half-dozen different, lavishly but uncomplicatedly decorated rooms, offering starkly different child-friendly themes, large enough to accommodate, small enough to be cozy, will be their special home for the next several years.
The 20-year-old nationally unique after-school learning center for students from 5 to 18, proudly boasts of seamlessly mainstreaming No Limits graduates.
Their Philosophy
Elizabeth Sanchez, aide to founder Dr. Michelle Christie, recently conducted a tour of one of the most humanitarian enterprises in Southern California. The United States, Ms. Sanchez says, is hardly packed with learning centers for deaf and hard-of-hearing of school age even though it is the most common birth defect. The sparseness remains a mystery.
“At No Limits, we believe in building the self-esteem and communication skills of children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing,” Ms. Sanchez said. “We provide the highest quality of services (from 18 teachers) so that they can all reach their potential regardless of their economic status.”
Comes now perhaps the most crucial dimension of No Limits’s mission:
Qualitatively and accessibly boosting the often-sagging psychological sides of young minds that never have heard a baby cry, a horn honk, a voice raised in joy or anger.
How better to facilitate this critically missing link to everyday life than via drama?
Dr. Christie designed an after-school theatre program to help bring out untested communication skills, nascent vocabularies, grammar rules that may feel strange, and to understand character-development through role-playing, says Ms. Sanchez.
(To be continued)
