Anyone Can Learn

In Spokane's school district 81, a handful of children from 5 to 24 years sat in the waiting room of the state-operated Health and Guidance Center. They were not normal children. Only a few had I.Q.s over 60; some could not walk or talk very well. Three years ago in Spokane, such retarded children would have been written off as "uneducatable." Now each child would see a team of doctors, take a series of tests, and then be educated by the State of Washington to the limit of his ability. For the parents sitting in the waiting room last week, the interviews were the final victory in a long, hard battle to win equal educational rights for mentally handicapped children.

This idea that mentally retarded children need not be put in institutions, but can live at home and go to school, began for Spokane in two basement rooms at St. Joseph's Orphanage. Washington had nothing then but two state asylums for such children, and no plans for an outside program. A nun (Sister M. Virginia Claire) decided to see what the parents themselves could do. She got four couples interested, and helped them draft a plan.

One Small Sentence. By January 1950, when the school was ready to open, parents of eleven children were paying a tuition fee of $20 a month. They hired a 23-year-old dramatics student, aptly named Patricia Aid, and volunteered to help train their children in the things most youngsters take for granted: how to color inside a square, cut a line with scissors, manage buttons, speak a few basic sentences.

The first year was bitterly hard. "Just existing was quite a struggle," recalls Pat Aid. The school grew to 15, then 24 students. The school had to move out of the orphanage, and scrape together $1,700 for a down payment on an empty house. Unable to pay all the bills, the parents appealed for help. They got $181 from a rummage sale, $800 from a Spokane summer theater, a $500 loan from a doctor. It cost about $300 per semester to teach each retarded child, and the bills kept piling up. For three months Patricia Aid got no pay; once she ran out of food. But the school kept going.

Teacher Aid and her volunteer parents geared their program to speech: if a child could talk, they decided, he could learn. They collected 15,000 pictures from magazines, made the youngest children form words about them. "Maybe after 20 times," says Pat Aid, "a child will suddenly achieve one small sentence." For older children they used card games, dice and bingo to teach numbers, taught sewing, weaving and elementary reading. Teacher Aid acted out such stories as Little Red Riding Hood with exaggerated expressions.

Vegetable with a Chip. Progress came slowly, but it came. A nine-year-old who used to scream and writhe uncontrollably now does second-grade reading; a husky 14-year-old who came in like "a vegetable with a chip on his shoulder" was coaxed into struggling with his three Rs.

All the while the parents kept nagging at the state and city to recognize the program and take over their school. Finally, early last year, the state legislature passed a bill permitting the Department of Education to provide for mentally handicapped children. Soon after, district 81 took over the program from the parents.

The school is now housed in a roomy red-brick school building, and its bills are paid by the state. Miss Aid still teaches alone, but next fall she may have 60 pupils and three assistants. Parents in New Jersey, Ohio, California and Massachusetts have heard of the school and written in for advice on how to start one. Spokane's parents do not yet know how much an uneducatable child can be taught, but with the help of other U.S. parents and educators, they hope to find out.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.