LD Resources

Sanford Shapiro looks at The Schenck School
© 2007 Sanford Shapiro

The Schenck School is located in Atlanta, Georgia for bright dyslexic students in grades one through eight. The school plans on opening a kindergarten in September 2007. Founded in 1959 by David Schenck, it has grown in size and reputation; it now enrolls approximately 195 students and offers extensive teacher training in Orton-Gillingham teaching. As an O-G training site, it has a nine month teacher training class that also serves its own faculty. In addition the school has a multi sensory phonics-based reading class in the evenings for adults with dyslexia.

This school is very clear in its mission and approach. It is very much designed to be a transition school for bright kids who’re struggling with print access due to dyslexia. Through the Orton Gillingham approach, woven into all subjects and integrated throughout the day, students learn skills and strategies for reading writing spelling and math. On average, students stay for two to three years and then return to other settings. There’s no hesitation about the goal to keep a child only for as long as needed. With the reputation the school has for excellence, there’s no shortage of applicants and the school is positioned to deliver on that promise.

With the intent of building transitional skills in order to return the child to the mainstream, curriculum is clearly intended to move writing skills forward in a graduated way, building skills and adding benchmarked expectations along the way. For example, in the primary grades (1-3) students are writing stories three times per week. Emphasis is on using and applying spelling strategies and increasing vocabulary (word banks). Students can be seen getting spelling help from teachers; writing the word in the air (building kinesthetic sense memory) for practice. In the fourth and fifth grade students start learning to deal with longer-term assignments and therefore time management. Recognizing the unique needs of middle schoolers (sixth through eighth graders) who sometimes enter the school with added years of being unremediated and more to unlearn, the school reduces the student to teacher ratio to four to one (from five to one). At this age study skills also begin playing an increased role, with focus on notebook maintenance, materials management and increased homework load. Expository, more formal writing takes a more central role at this point as well.

In general, students are given lots of one to one help in addition to group work. Beyond all this remedial skill building literacy learning work, I saw plenty of art and music and time for kids to play and get involved with physical activities and classes.

Related at this site: The Schenck School