LD Resources

Sanford Shapiro looks at The Wardlaw School
© 2007 Sanford Shapiro

The Wardlaw School is another school for kids with language-based learning disabilities in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s actually part of the overall organization called The Atlanta Speech School. However, since it is distinct in its profile than the other parts of Atlanta Speech, I’m making a separate entry.

The Wardlaw School operates as a day school for elementary aged children with mild to moderate language based learning disabilities. The school describes the student profile as testing in the Bright Average Range of an IQ assessment. They operate as a transition school enrolling kids for a few years and returning them to other more mainstreamed settings. Given the shorter length of stay, they try not to enroll kids whose learning disabilities are considered in the severe range. In addition kids with attention or behavioral issues that are significant enough to interfere with the group model and structure would not do well on a long-term basis. Obviously those types of judgements can be hard to tease apart solely through reading an assessment, so a thorough admission’s visit is in order. Structurally, they organize into nineteen classes among the lower division (K-2) and Upper School (3-6) with classes typically having nine students.

Wardlaw is set up with a significant speech language orientation. Their leadership structure in fact, is equally shared between two heads of school. One is education and learning disabilities specialist and the other is a speech and language pathologist. Oral communication, language/vocabulary comprehension, and pragmatic conversation skills is given a place right alongside of decoding fluency and spelling instruction.

Impressively all teachers at this school hold masters level degrees in either learning disabilities, speech and language pathology or reading. There are five full time speech and language specialists and they are used extensively. To me the school demonstrated a high level of collaboration between the two disciplines. There were classes where both a teacher and SLP were present and the roles overlapped in a good way. In one primary classroom I was in, the kids were giving oral reports and were assisted by the speech teacher in following the strategies for good presentation. There were lots of visual cues in all the classrooms to help remind students of important processes/sequences. The different reading and language development programs are all research based and generally followed an Orton Gillingham perspective. The school leans more towards remedial activities than content area curriculum or special activities as they call them, because of the transitional nature of the student enrollment. For example, science and social studies are seen as opportunities to practice and apply the literacy and overall learning strategies learned.

In one fourth grade room, I watched a grammar lesson (not my favorite subject). After witnessing one of the more intense and sophisticated sentence diagramming I’ve seen about objects and transitive verbs (complete with impressive recitations by students about parts of speech) I asked some kids to tell me in their own words about what they just did. I also asked them to tell me the purpose or value of what they had done. I must say they gave really good answers to each.

Interestingly I couldn’t help notice that unlike a fair amount of schools for kids with learning disabilities, this school appeared to have an almost equal number of girls to boys. The Kindergarten class I saw had a lot of adults in the room and a variety of structured activities for the kids to engage with. The activities were designed around auditory processing skills, handwriting, and learning alphabetic sound/code associations. Children entering their kindergarten are given the CTOPP in order to assess their skills and struggles in phonological processing. They are then grouped in activities based around the needs.

Related at this site: The Wardlaw School (part of The Atlanta Speech School)