Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
In a small white room designed for the daily meeting of two people, Sean Hussey, 13 years old, is building his reading skills.
Sean is small and slim and lively, with hands that move as he speaks, adding emphasis and expression to his words. His voice has already deepened, but its roughness shows that it will become lower still. He seems comfortable, working as if improving his reading skills is his own goal, not just the teacher’s. When he is distracted by noises in the hall, his teacher, Kathleen Harshman, brings his attention back to the work with no sign of impatience or irritation.
The room is clean and plain. The blinds on the window are lowered, and thin strips of sunshine glow on the creamy wall. There is nothing to distract Sean from the magnetized board of letters and the quiet, matter-of-fact voice of his tutor. The two of them spend 45 minutes each day here.
In the eight months since Sean began attending Churchill Center & School for Learning Disabilities, in Ladue, his reading level has jumped from the second grade to the sixth grade. “He’s soaking it up like a sponge,” says Harshman. “He’s flying through the program.”
Churchill is designed for children like Sean—kids with normal or gifted intelligence whose learning disabilities impede their progress in school. On average, students spend three years at Churchill. Grades served are first through ninth (10th until recently), and the program is designed to prepare students to return to a traditional school and succeed there. Nationally known for its excellence, Churchill charges a hefty $26,000 in tuition (nearly 10 percent of students receive financial aid), yet it has drawn students from 39 other states and Canada. With a student body of about 125 kids each year, that’s a lot of diversity since the school opened full-time in 1980.
That diversity extends beyond mere geography: “Our alums are everything from lawyers and physical therapists to artists and doctors,” says Anne Evers, director of admissions. Their success began in the calm, attentive atmosphere of Churchill, where kids who show up in other environments as timid, embarrassed or angry appear quietly confident, curious and respectful.
“I don’t overwork; I don’t stress myself out like I did at [my other school],” Sean explains. “They didn’t understand what I was going through or thinking. I was in this little circle,” he says, touching fingers and thumbs in a small circle to his right. “And they—” he circles his arms out to the left in a wide sweep, “were all over there.
“My best grade on my report card before was either a D or a C,” Sean adds. “Now it’s an A. This is the first time I’ve ever had straight A’s in my whole life.”
A relaxed air of acceptance permeates all of Churchill’s classes, not just the daily tutoring session that is the heart of the approach. In gym, the kids compete against their own bests, not against each other. In Sean’s science class, his teacher calmly answers all questions even if they are interruptions, keeping an eye on her nine students (a typical number for most classes). She keeps everyone focused on the day’s topic—which, today, happens to be the boiling points of different liquids—while supervising individual work, which is different for each child.
The building off Clayton Road on Price School Lane that now houses the school is a beautiful Spanish mission–style structure—but inside it shows the wear and tear of nearly a century of schoolchildren and the awkwardness of expansion in bits and pieces. Kids from elementary through middle school crowd into small classrooms and overwhelm the tiny gym. These cramped conditions will be relieved in the fall, when a $10 million facility opens at Clayton and I-270.
The new building’s 46,000 square feet will provide more room not only for full-time students and teachers, but also for the center’s community outreach services. Churchill’s extensive workshops train teachers and parents to help learning-disabled children, a speaker series brings in professionals who present the latest information about the needs of the kids, and a tutoring program—in partnership with St. Louis Children’s Hospital—provides free help for cancer patients whose schoolwork has been compromised by illness. A new program to teach reading to learning-disabled adults will begin soon as well.
And then there are the regular classes.
“It’s just been a joy for us,” says Sean’s mother, Jill Hussey. “There’s no ‘Gee, Sean, is your homework done?’—none of that going on between us anymore. It’s lovely. I like not arguing about homework. And now I know that when Sean grows up, he’s going to be able to read. He needs to have this skill. He can’t go out and fill out a job application and say, ‘Please read this to me.’”
For seven years Sean received all the care and support his private school could supply. He also received supplemental help from the Special School District. But at the end of seventh grade, he still read at the second-grade level.
Now, every school day, he sits in that small white room, at a desk wedged into the corner, and works with Harshman. This teaching session is certainly about reading—but it’s also about building confidence, about respect, about trust. Harshman waits quietly while Sean talks, never interrupting. She answers all his questions. She maintains a pleasant and relaxed control of the tutoring hour, but she gives Sean all the room he needs to feel at ease.
“When I was learning before, it would just go in one ear and come out the other,” Sean says. “Now it comes in the ear, and it stays.”
