RISING TO THE CHALLENGE OF EDUCATING ALL OUR STUDENTS Challenges Amidst Growth The overall achievements of the contemporary Orthodox world in the area of chinuch are truly remarkable. Practically every yeshiva and girlsí school in every community with a concentration of Orthodox Jews is overflowing with children, bli ayin hara. Classes numbering 30 children or more are not unusual. This phenomenal success is not only quantitative, but qualitative as well. The level of learning today, when contrasted with that of 30 years ago, is without doubt much more encompassing in terms of both amount of material covered and the depth with which it is studied. With all of this commendable and encouraging progress, however, there are issues in our chinuch system that need to be addressed. One of the most pressing of these is the large number of children in our schools who have learning disabilities, but whose needs are being met either inadequately or not at all. To appreciate the scope of this problem, consider the following statistic. In the general student population nationwide, as well as within our own yeshivos (and let no principal deny this fact), 10-15% of students have learning disabilities of one form or another. This figure holds true in all types of yeshivos and girlsí schools. The situation takes on a very personal immediacy when one realizes that a family with six or seven childrenóand our communities are blessed with many such familiesóis statistically likely to include at least one child with learning difficulties. If, thankfully, a particular family does not, a neighboring family most likely has two such children. The sad reality is that there are scores of Yiddishe kinderlach in heavily Orthodox neighborhoods whose parents have no option but to send them to public school programs to receive instruction that will enable them to overcome their learning disabilities. There are other parents who insist, at all costs, on keeping their children in yeshiva for its proper religious environment, but thereby forego providing those youngsters with the help they so desperately need. The Parent's Role The purpose of this article is to address what must, can, and is being done to meet the needs of these children. Dr. Nosson Solomon provides a description of the various categories of learning and attentional disorders in his very informative article elsewhere in this issue. It suffices to say for our purposes that all of these disabilities can be addressed successfully. The key is early identification and remediation, and in this regard, parents have a crucial role to play. All too often, parents are in denial of their child's predicament. Refusing to admit there is anything wrong with their child, they seek to place the blame elsewhere-on the rebbe, the teacher, the principal, the child's friends, and so on. Yet, parents who react in this way are doing their child a terrible disservice, for not only do they make everyone that has contact with the child-and the child himself-miserable, but they deprive their child of his best opportunities for remediation. Parents faced with this challenge need to know that a child with a learning disability will bring them no less nachas than any other; he is simply a child with greater-than-usual needs who can and will succeed if given the tools to do so. A controversial issue in this area is whether to medicate children with learning and, to an even greater degree, attentional deficits. Parents should take this question up with their rav and physician. Clearly, however, parents who unequivocally oppose medicating their child even under extreme circumstances should consider that they might well be depriving their child of a childhood. Children who are repeatedly sent out of class for disturbances are not happy children; they see themselves as social misfits and, as a result, suffer from terribly low self-esteem. Educators know that a child whose morale is high because the adults in his life create an atmosphere of loving acceptance and believe in his ability to succeed has a far greater probability of achieving that success. But acceptance entails a willingness to face the reality of a childís disability. Every yeshiva child is entitled, as a matter of federal law, to receive a comprehensive evaluation from the local school district free of charge. A parent who suspects that something is significantly amiss in his childís progress in any academic area should have that child evaluated without delay. Even before a child begins school, itís never too early to identify and address developmental delays through testing and remediation that are often available even in the comfort of one's own home. On file in my office is a reproduction of a composition written by a then-second-grader in the yeshiva where this writer serves as principal. The composition was written backwards, in mirror image. The child who wrote it is today an outstanding talmid in one of this countryís leading yeshivos gedolos, and his rosh yeshiva delights in engaging in Torah discussions with him. Had this disability been ignored, it is not hard to imagine that he might today be on the roster of an ìat-risk teenî program like Project YES. Happily, however, his parents and his yeshiva believed in him, nurtured him, and helped him become the success story he is today b"h. A Word To My Colleagues We menahalim must face the challenges that our calling creates for us. Our schools are not meant to be servicing prize students exclusively. Should any of us take steps to address the needs of the learning disabled population in his yeshiva, he need not fear it will tarnish his institutionís reputation as a first-rate school. Just as our yeshivos strive to engage the best possible rebbeíim and teachers, to offer the most up-to-date facilities, and so on, so too do they need to service the educational needs of all their students. When the few learning disabled children in every class have access to a properly staffed resource room, the benefit redounds not only to those students, but also to the rest of the class. The rebbe or mora, who generally does not have training in special education, is relieved of having to spend an inordinate amount of time addressing the needs of the learning disabled students and can focus on the other students. Of course, resource room services occupy only a limited amount of time in a student's school day and, thus, it is imperative that our teaching staffs receive training in dealing with the learning disabled children present in their classrooms. The focus of such sessions should be on giving mechanchim the tools to both identify potential disabilities and to make appropriate modifications for such children within the mainstream setting. Even in the best of worlds, howeveróone in which every yeshiva would have a spacious, fully equipped resource room staffed by an adequate number of trained professionalsóthere would still remain a significant number of children whose level of disability requires a self-contained class with a maximum of 8-10 students, taught by a special educator. In fact, PíTACH pioneered this concept decades ago and operates such classes in several New York yeshivos with much success. A Bold New Response Most schools, however, are unable, independently, to host a program for the learning disabled encompassing several grades, due to lack of space and budgetary constraints. The result has been an appalling dearth of self-contained classrooms for learning-disabled yeshiva students. Earlier this year, in a groundbreaking response to this situation, nine prominent Brooklyn boysí yeshivos joined together in a new initiative, aptly named Ichud Mosdos Hachinuch of Brooklyn, which pools the resources and children in need within these schools. These pace-setting schools, so deserving of recognition for their leadership in this area, are: Ateret Torah, Chaim Berlin, The Cheder, Mirrer Yeshiva K'tana, Ohr Shraga D'Veretzky, Ruach Chaim, Tiferes Elimelech, Tiferes Yisroel and Yeshiva of Brooklyn. The Ichud program, modeled after the CAHAL program that has been successful in the Far Rockaway/Five Towns community over the past eight years, services the collective learning-disabled students of its member yeshivos-a novel idea for Brooklyn, but rather basic in concept. A first grade opens in one yeshiva, comprised of children from all member schools who need a self-contained classroom on a first-grade level. The following year, that class continues on in the same school as a second grade class, while a new first grade Ichud class opens in another yeshiva. In just a few years, this approach results in a program of self-contained classes spanning first through eighth grades, and on into high school, which serves hundreds of children in numerous schools, yet allows each individual child to remain in one yeshiva throughout. An essential aspect of the program is that the Ichud class is fully integrated into the school and treated as another parallel class. The school administration, which retains ultimate responsibility for this class, like any other, works in tandem with the teachers of both the Ichud class and the classes parallel to it to create an accepting atmosphere devoid of stigma, and to ensure the mainstreaming of the Ichud students for lunch, recess, assemblies, transportation and any other opportunity. The defining element of the Ichud concept can be expressed in one word: responsibility. Its initiation by these yeshivos is a declaration of their willingness to take responsibility for the education of their children, rather than assuming that it will be attended to by some other, ìspecialî school. All that remains at this crucial stage of the Ichudís inception is for the broad community, whose children these are, to make a declaration of its own, signaling that it is prepared to ensure the financial viability of such programs so that they can expand and realize their potential to profoundly change the face of contemporary chinuch. At the Ichud's recent inaugural fundraiser, the Novominsker Rebbe, shlita, referred to this program's founding as an event of historic proportions, one that would have been unthinkable even 10 or 20 years ago, but whose time has arrived. It is my prayeróand it should be our collective aspirationóthat we be worthy of this challenge, and that we will summon the foresight and fortitude necessary to realize the navi's vision of Víchol bonayich limudei Hashem-"And all your children will be students of Hashem" (Yishayahu 54,13).
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