Since 1950, the mission of The Howard School on Atlanta’s westside has been steadfast: to educate students with language-based learning disabilities. Classes from kindergarten through high school have helped students overcome a range of obstacles.
Yet as successful as the school’s approach has been, Jennifer Topple felt something was missing.
“There’s been a growing desire to get what we do within The Howard School into the community,” said Topple, the director of language, literacy and assistive technology. “It’s been a topic that’s come up over the last few years.”
Part of that desire grew from the positive experiences Howard speech language pathologists have had when working with children outside the school.
“It’s made them better with our kids, and everyone feels good when they’re helping people,” said Topple. “There’s something wonderful about being able to reach kids who might not be getting what they need where they are.”
Offering the school’s specialized services to others required some tactful skill, Topple said.
“You’re not going to walk into a public school and tell them you’re the expert and know what to do – that doesn’t sit well with people,” she said. “We had to start by asking what they needed and what we could to do help their programs. With that information, we could design an outreach program from the ground up.”
A pilot program connected Howard staff to children at the Boyce Ansley School in Midtown and the Refugee Family Literacy program in Clarkston. When it wrapped up at the end of the school year, Topple knew the model was sustainable.
“At the Ansley School, we did concentrated days of language and hearing screenings and worked to develop an admissions screening for them so when kids come in, they can assess where they are developmentally,” she said. “At the Clarkston school, we supervised Georgia State speech pathology students who were working with about 60 kids.”
The literacy, language and speech development knowledge the Howard staffers provided was a gift to the Ansley School, said Kate Kennedy, who founded the facility that serves children who have been homeless.
“They came at the beginning of the school year and assessed all our children for speech, hearing and language issues,” she said. “They wrote reports on each child, then sent their therapists back and got all our children to a place where they could say with confidence that any delays they had were not from developmental issues. They’ve also written a screening program for us.”
Kennedy added that having such services were invaluable for her young students.
“Our children were the greatest beneficiaries because they received the expertise The Howard School can provide, and it’s put them on a different trajectory,” she said. “Both our school and The Howard School got a lot out of it.”
The success of the pilot program has provided the motivation to expand the outreach to at least one more school this fall, said Topple.
“It’s a wonderful way to expand out school’s mission,” she said. “And it’s making our people stronger.”
Information about The Howard School is online at howardschool.org.
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Each week we look at programs, projects and successful endeavors at area schools, from pre-K to grad school. To suggest a story, contact H.M. Cauley at hm_cauley@yahoo.com or 770-744-3042.
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