Sanford Shapiro looks at The Centreville School
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
Sanford Shapiro looks at The Centreville School
© 2007 Sanford Shapiro
The Centreville School is a school for kids with language-based learning disabilities and has been around since it’s founding in 1974. It’s located in Centreville, Delaware, which is very close to the border with Pennsylvania. It works with kids from age four through 14 and is focused on the enhancement of literacy skills and adds content area classes in science, social sciences, physical education and the arts.
It’s a relatively small school, with approximately 140 students. It has a small intimate feeling and the classrooms seemed well equipped and with well-paced instruction. As the emphasis is on working with kids with reading and writing difficulties, they subscribe to all the elements outlined in the work of the National Reading Panel: phonemic awareness and phonics, fluency and text comprehension.
Within the classroom, language-processing support is given through Lindamood-Bell programs such as Visualizing and Verbalizing, Seeing Stars, and Phoneme Sequencing. The classes range in size in the early grades at six or seven students to the upper grades with a maximum number is twelve. Sometimes classroom groups will break down to even smaller numbers for the language processing instruction. With three speech-language specialists, consultation with classroom teachers occurs frequently.
The math instruction is well laid out into what they call Math Meeting, Fact Practice, The Lesson, and Guided Class Practice. Guided by the best practices of instruction for students with learning differences, these four components give math a type of spiraling approach that is constantly reviewing, giving time to learn new facts and processes, and providing time each day to practice learned material. In addition, the focus of the “meeting” part concentrates on applied math and language of math through practicing calendar, time, money, place value, graphing and visual thinking as well as mental computation practice.
Centreville also utilizes occupational therapy specialists to evaluate each incoming child for sensory processing weaknesses and motor coordination needs. They will provide OT programming where needed and also use the OT inspired handwriting program “Handwriting Without Tears.”
Related at this site: The Centreville School
My daughter is finishing her third year at Centreville. The description here is very accurate. The faculty is very responsive, and they understand their students well. Speech and OT are well integrated into the day. They really work hard to take the whole child into account. The admissions officer spends a lot of time, even visiting the prospective student in their school to observe them.
My child’s difficulty is more with math and writing, not reading, and they handle this well, although probably most of the kids struggle more in reading. They are also familiar with and able to work with ADHD.
I have been very happy with it, as has my daughter.