Sean Manning, a senior at a private high school in Brooklyn, decided it was time to take his life back. So he fired Lynne Hacker, the speech-language pathologist who had been helping him deal with his learning disability and attention-deficit disorder since he was 12. He also stopped seeing the psychiatrist who monitors his Adderall (a stimulant similar to Ritalin) and stopped taking the medication—except when he feels like it. Cool, obviously intelligent, and stylish in a cashmere sweater and soft leather jacket, looking every bit the Upper East Side kid he is, Sean explains, “I’m keen on my privacy. I don’t want my parents knowing what I do. I don’t want Lynne knowing. I know my parents and Lynne want to help so bad, but they turn it on me, and it makes matters worse. I get angry because they want to get involved so much.”
Sean has been tested and tutored since nursery school. The issues his preschool teacher identified—speech problems, difficulties with peers, impulsiveness—dogged him throughout elementary school. “He just pissed everyone off all the time,” his mother recalls. “He would get everything wrong, never hear you, ask the same question over and over. I remember going on field trips with his class, hearing kids say, ‘Okay, Sean, you asked me that six times.’ ”
Shortly after Sean began sixth grade, Hacker, who has been diagnosing and treating learning-disabled kids for over 30 years, found that in addition to a language disorder and deficits in “executive functioning,” particularly memory and organization, Sean had ADD, making him inattentive and prone to risky behavior. Sean saw Hacker two to four times a week on and off over the course of the next six years, and at first seemed responsive to therapy.
But by high school, he was becoming less and less compliant, establishing a pattern typical of many LD teenagers: He’d begin the school year with good intentions, promising to take his Adderall and keep up with the work. By mid-semester, he’d start to fall behind, and forget or refuse (depending on who was telling the story) to take his meds. He traveled back and forth across town to whichever of his divorced parents’ houses he chose on a given day and, in both homes, fought with the adults over rules and homework and what was best for him. He lavished time on photography, played his guitar, and wrote music, all of which conferred a sense of accomplishment that school did not. And he increasingly turned to pot. “It made me happier,” he says. “When I’m stoned, I’m not conscious of being ADD.”
Recently, Sean and his father struck a deal: Dad, a fund manager on Wall Street, gives his son $50 to $100 when he gets an A or B; Sean pays it back when he earns a lower grade. So far, he’s ahead. His parents are holding their breath. “The truth,” his mother admits, “is that we’re just trying to get him out of high school.”
After more than a decade of research and press about learning disabilities and the controversial practice of medicating children as young as 4, New York private and public schools are alert, if not hypersensitive, to the earliest signs of trouble. At the same time, an ever-expanding legion of specialists is helping kids with learning issues decode language and handle the rigorous homework and exams that competitive private schools demand. All this attention allows many bewildered, underachieving elementary-school kids to make substantial gains and perform much more like the intelligent children they are.
But when these tutored and tested and often medicated kids reach adolescence, many of them hit a wall. “Being identified early is not enough,” Hacker explains. “This is a lifelong issue. Many kids come to me with tons of remediation behind them, but without the knowledge of what to expect in middle and high school.”
Absent such preparation, says Hacker, the Johnny Can’t Read kid has a good chance of becoming Johnny Who Doesn’t Care. He’s taller than his parents, he has a mind of his own, and he’s a master at wearing them down. Maybe he’s failing out of the private school his parents pulled strings to get him into and hired tutors to keep him in. Maybe he’s spending more and more time with his skateboarding pals, thrill-seeking and smoking weed to insulate himself from daily failure. Or maybe he (or she—though girls display subtler signs and tend to be diagnosed later, these are equal-opportunity disorders) is sweet but isolated, a kid who swims painfully alone in the social stream, blaming the alienation on himself.
And here’s the cruelest irony: In a city rich with educational resources, the number of schools willing and able to handle their challenges is alarmingly small. Getting into a good private nursery school is child’s play compared with the applications-to-admissions ratio at Winston Prep and the Churchill School, the only two high schools in Manhattan established solely for kids with learning disabilities—and yes, both are named after the former prime minister of Britain, who was dyslexic. Churchill, which expanded its program past middle school just two years ago to help meet the demand, stopped taking applications for next year after 150 had been received—for about eight slots. “Word on the street, one mother told me,” says Kristy Baxter, head of the Churchill School and its related center, “is that we’re harder to get into than Harvard.”
To be sure, all children become more vulnerable as they slouch toward adulthood. Social demands escalate, schoolwork becomes more sophisticated, and hormones wreak havoc. But kids with learning disabilities and ADD experience a double whammy: Just as they are beset by increased self-consciousness and a raging desire to strike out on their own, their academic struggles reach a crescendo. Going from the safety of one classroom to the confusion of many, given hours of homework and assignments requiring abstract thinking, youngsters who floundered in elementary school can find themselves drowning.
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Recently, Sean and his father struck a deal: Dad, a fund manager on Wall Street, gives his son $50 to $100 when he gets an A or B; Sean pays it back when he earns a lower grade. So far, he’s ahead. His parents are holding their breath. “The truth,” his mother admits, “is that we’re just trying to get him out of high school.”
After more than a decade of research and press about learning disabilities and the controversial practice of medicating children as young as 4, New York private and public schools are alert, if not hypersensitive, to the earliest signs of trouble. At the same time, an ever-expanding legion of specialists is helping kids with learning issues decode language and handle the rigorous homework and exams that competitive private schools demand. All this attention allows many bewildered, underachieving elementary-school kids to make substantial gains and perform much more like the intelligent children they are.
But when these tutored and tested and often medicated kids reach adolescence, many of them hit a wall. “Being identified early is not enough,” Hacker explains. “This is a lifelong issue. Many kids come to me with tons of remediation behind them, but without the knowledge of what to expect in middle and high school.”
Absent such preparation, says Hacker, the Johnny Can’t Read kid has a good chance of becoming Johnny Who Doesn’t Care. He’s taller than his parents, he has a mind of his own, and he’s a master at wearing them down. Maybe he’s failing out of the private school his parents pulled strings to get him into and hired tutors to keep him in. Maybe he’s spending more and more time with his skateboarding pals, thrill-seeking and smoking weed to insulate himself from daily failure. Or maybe he (or she—though girls display subtler signs and tend to be diagnosed later, these are equal-opportunity disorders) is sweet but isolated, a kid who swims painfully alone in the social stream, blaming the alienation on himself.
And here’s the cruelest irony: In a city rich with educational resources, the number of schools willing and able to handle their challenges is alarmingly small. Getting into a good private nursery school is child’s play compared with the applications-to-admissions ratio at Winston Prep and the Churchill School, the only two high schools in Manhattan established solely for kids with learning disabilities—and yes, both are named after the former prime minister of Britain, who was dyslexic. Churchill, which expanded its program past middle school just two years ago to help meet the demand, stopped taking applications for next year after 150 had been received—for about eight slots. “Word on the street, one mother told me,” says Kristy Baxter, head of the Churchill School and its related center, “is that we’re harder to get into than Harvard.”
To be sure, all children become more vulnerable as they slouch toward adulthood. Social demands escalate, schoolwork becomes more sophisticated, and hormones wreak havoc. But kids with learning disabilities and ADD experience a double whammy: Just as they are beset by increased self-consciousness and a raging desire to strike out on their own, their academic struggles reach a crescendo. Going from the safety of one classroom to the confusion of many, given hours of homework and assignments requiring abstract thinking, youngsters who floundered in elementary school can find themselves drowning.
A sense of safety—and relief at not being out of sync—is high on most teens’ lists when they recite the benefits of these schools. It comes from smaller classrooms, individualized attention, and teachers who respect that they learn differently and who help them understand themselves. Sam Rivers, the late artist Larry Rivers’s son, was also part of Churchill’s charter ninth grade. “Churchill was the fertilizer for a seed that was inside of me,” he muses. “I’ve gained a lot of self-confidence. At my old school, I was the weirdo.”
The comfort level is so high that the kids here—smart, creative, and as vivacious as any teenagers—bristle at being singled out. “Why do you have to keep referring to this as a ‘special’ school?” a junior wanted to know when I visited Churchill. “Just because we learn differently, I’m still a normal kid.”
Dylan Clark, a junior at Winston, made a similar point to an administrator: “This school shouldn’t market itself as an LD school, but as a school that teaches interestingly. I know tons of kids who aren’t LD but can’t learn because school is too boring.”
Here in “Tutor City”—a term coined by Richard Soghoian, headmaster of LD-friendly Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School—15 to 25 percent of students in private schools are kept afloat by therapists, tutors, and homework helpers. A Roper Poll conducted in 2000 helps explain why: 48 percent of parents feel that having the LD label is more harmful than struggling privately with a learning disability. And in a city where children’s schools are chits of social currency, observes Regina Price, a Manhattan attorney, “there are people who give their kids five days a week of tutoring and therapy for fear of not having the child at one of the right schools.”
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.