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Learning Curve

Parents whose learning-disabled children tough it out—with ample help—in mainstream schools tend to see it as a victory, but the emotional cost can be higher than they anticipated. Betsy Martinson, a quiet, self-critical girl diagnosed with ADD in the ninth grade, had managed to get B’s and C’s throughout middle school. It wasn’t her ditziness (she’d sometimes study for the wrong final) that prompted a reevaluation after eighth grade. It was Betsy’s untenable anxiety around schoolwork and social situations. “She had friends but a tremendous fear of rejection,” her father explains. “Sometimes, when she felt nothing was going right, she’d get so flustered she’d have these momentary breakdowns.” Betsy now takes anti-anxiety meds in addition to Adderall and attends an LD-friendly school where “the teachers have the time to show you personally what to do. But I still get a little anxious,” she adds. “I can’t change that—it’s just the way my brain works.”

Many private-school kids with learning disabilities who are struggling, particularly the disruptive ones, are “counseled out”—a euphemism, says Ronald Stewart, the outspoken headmaster of LD-friendly York Prep, that can mean anything from a cold “We’re not giving you a contract next year” to a compassionate “Let us work together to find a better placement.”

While parents fault the independent schools for hustling their children out the door, specialists don’t. In fact, Stewart and others charge that top-tier schools hold on to some students too long. “This is one of those hidden secrets in New York—that LD students are maintained in schools where they shouldn’t be through the artifice of tutors and the influence of money. But a child who is doing five hours a night of homework is not enjoying adolescence.”

Winston’s Bezsylko defends independent schools’ right to be selective. “They don’t claim to do all things for all people—they’re set up to get kids into the Ivy Leagues. It’s not that these private schools aren’t serving kids well. They do reach out. The real problem is the lack of other options when it’s not a good match of student and school.”

Gavin Harrison, for example, languished for seven years in one of New York’s most prestigious old-money schools. Despite tutoring since kindergarten and psychotherapy from second grade on, Gavin was initially diagnosed as clinically depressed; he couldn’t write a paragraph, never read a book, and refused to do his homework. Embarrassed by his failures and feeling like he didn’t fit in with the preppy student body, five-foot-four Gavin stuffed himself with soda and chips from the corner bodega and ballooned from being a skinny kid, his mother recalls, to 160 pounds. Despite his escalating misery, she says, the family delayed the process of switching schools. “His sister went there. I thought it was better for him to be with other smart kids and that at some point the coping techniques would all kick in.”

“It was the worst time of my life,” recalls Gavin. “I was a very violent individual, and I got into fights all the time.” He has since sprouted up, thinned down, and transferred to an LD-friendly school where he is thriving and infinitely happier.

Finding an appropriate match between school and student leads to success, says Frank Leana, a teacher turned education consultant in Manhattan. “Some schools have an incredibly sophisticated component and others have one or two teachers. The question is what’s going to work for a particular child.”

Regina Price’s son, now in eighth grade, transferred to an LD-friendly school five years ago, but he continues to need tutoring three times a week. “If he’s still limping next year,” Price says with reluctance, “we might put him in a special school. You can’t leave a kid where he’s getting hammered. You want him to have the success.” Kristy Baxter meets many parents struggling with similar misgivings. “I always say to them, ‘Until you settle your ambivalence about sending a child to a special school, you can’t expect your child to be comfortable about it.’ ”

Many lower schools for learning-disabled students try to prepare their kids for the powerful changes adolescence brings. At Stephen Gaynor, for example, an LD school that goes up to age 13, the goal is to remediate and channel students to mainstream high schools, explains Yvette Siegel, director of education. She considers herself lucky to find high-school placements for Gaynor’s graduates, 95 percent of whom go on to LD-friendly schools; the rest still need the intense support of special schools. “There are so few options.”

Winston and Churchill offer, between them, only about ten to fifteen high-school openings every year. The same is true of LD-friendly schools—highly regarded Columbia Grammar admits 1 student for every 200 who apply to its LD program. The competition forces many bright LD students to commute to day schools outside the city (a third of the students at the Community School in Teaneck, for instance, are from Manhattan) or transfer to boarding school. Some families just give up and leave the city altogether.

Meanwhile, thousands of public-school teenagers are vying for the same precious few places in LD-friendly day schools and state-approved special schools. Even if you add in the best public-school programs and LD and LD-friendly boarding schools, notes Susan Luger, who heads the for-profit Children’s Advisory Group, “I would estimate that it’s still not enough to accommodate even 10 percent of the kids, assuming all those kids were to apply.”

Public schools are mandated by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act to educate all children in the “least restrictive environment.” Hence, LD kids, who made up more than half of the 29,000 students referred to special ed last year, are usually mainstreamed in general-ed classes and given an Individual Education Plan, or IEP, that outlines whatever additional tutoring, therapy, or accommodations are needed.

Naturally, some districts do a better job than others, and what looks good on paper doesn’t necessarily live up to its promise. “We have parents who don’t feel their child’s IEP is working and who have borrowed money, mortgaged their houses, taken funds out of their 401(k)’s, borrowed $1,000 from 25 different relatives to pay tuition,” notes Luger. “And it’s not because they don’t want their kids to go to public school. They just want them to get an appropriate education.”

Owing in part, Luger says, to the indefatigability of these parents and the assistance of attorneys and advocacy groups who understand the ins and outs of federal, state, and city laws, thousands of families received public funds last year to pay for private day and residential schools. But appealing to the Committee on Special Education (CSE) is not for the faint of heart. A thorough evaluation, which can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $3,500 if done privately, is a necessary first step, especially if the child was last tested in elementary school (retesting every three years is mandatory). “You don’t have to have an attorney, but it helps if you have a good one—someone who understands the subtleties,” offers Miguel Salazar, program director at Resources for Children With Special Needs, a Manhattan referral-and-advocacy agency for children with disabilities.

“It becomes like a second job,” agrees Marilyn Taylor, who has been battling the Board of Ed (which, under Mayor Bloomberg, has morphed into the Department of Education) since her son, now 16, was left back in first grade. She painstakingly documented his lack of progress and, with Luger’s help, finally managed to get the CSE to pay for an all-boys LD boarding school in Vermont, where Ryan is finally making up for lost time. “He could have gotten help earlier, but they kept telling me he’d mature,” Taylor recalls. “By junior high school, his case file was five inches thick, and someone at the hearing had the nerve to ask me, ‘Why did you wait so long?’ If I hadn’t kept going until I finally found these people, my son would have been another kid who was washed out of the system.”

The LD kids who shared their stories with New York agree with 26-year-old Jonathan Mooney, co-author with David Cole of Learning Outside the Lines, which chronicles their trials as LD kids, that “professional services didn’t make a difference in my life—people did.” For Mooney, who has “the attention span of a gnat,” it was his mother: “She helped me understand how my mind works and then taught me how to use my strengths to accommodate my weaknesses.” For Natalie, a shy 15-year-old Russian immigrant whose advice to other kids is “Get friends who won’t laugh at you,” it was the seventh-grade teacher who smiled at her and admitted he had ADD, too. “Throughout the year, I felt very special around him,” she says. And for Gavin, who is becoming a gifted writer, it’s his tutor, Lynne Hacker. “I swore I wouldn’t go to another tutor, but she was the first person who knew what I was thinking and really understood where I was coming from.

She’s helping me get through high school, and she’s been able to help me feel like I can really write. It was definitely the right decision.”

The names of some students and parents quoted in this story have been changed at their request.