feature stories

A house of love and learning

by Ellie Spielberg

Sep 6, 2007 6:13 PM

Sharing heartbreak and joy part of the job for these Queens educators

It’s the prettiest place you hope a child never has to be. Parklike grounds, a footpath winding through azalea bushes, a bench where you can sit and gaze at a fountain. You think of all the parents who have sat there, trying to find strength as they ask themselves for the millionth time why it happened to them, to their child.

PS 23 at St. Mary’s Hospital for Children, cloistered in a lush, serene neighborhood of grand houses and well-tended gardens in Bayside, Queens, is intimate with brutal street violence.

Whenever you read in the news that a teenager was shot in the head during a fight over a girl or that a 3rd-grader took a bullet in the spine in a drive-by shooting — those are the kids who, if they live, will wind up at St. Mary’s and become students at PS 23.

The small bucolic school is also intimate with what a human being can be reduced to when a car goes zig instead of zag or after the riptide has turned a day trip into a nightmare.

Whenever you hear on the radio that a car filled with teenagers hit a traffic divider going 80 and flipped over four times, or two kids were pulled unconscious out of the water — the survivors will wind up at the school. St. Mary’s state-of-the-art pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury and Coma Recovery Program, the first of its kind to be certified in New York City, is their destination after some emergency room has brought them back from the dead.

The school at St. Mary’s is also intimate with the random fate doled out by genetics. The hospital’s specialized medical and nursing-care program provides comprehensive therapy for children with diseases, congenital disorders and numerous other conditions. And when children are ready, no matter what brought them to St. Mary’s, they will be in the hands of people who have learned long ago to stop questioning fate and to lovingly get down to business: teachers and paraprofessionals who have faith that every single child can learn.
The building is one of PS 23’s eight schools located at various institutions in Queens.
It’s a country-style schoolhouse attached to the hospital by a corridor, where teachers welcome all children who have had to cross that corridor in their young lives. Helping a with-it kid recovering from cancer surgery and mastering sophisticated vocabulary words. Helping another rediscover speech. Figuring out how to communicate with a child who has no words at all. Teaching a girl who’s bright and funny but can’t raise her hand or a boy who doesn’t know what a hand is.
It’s a house of love and learning, run 12 months a year by an extended family brought together by chance who share the heartbreak and joy that come with the territory.

“It’s a challenge, but we make it work,” says Debbie Kreinan, who teaches a class of high school students with multiple disabilities. She and paraprofessionals Cathy Brunie and Sylvia Lieberman work seamlessly with kids able to take standardized tests and alternative assessment students, who cannot.
“They establish relationships with each other. One high-functioning child said to me, ‘This is very humbling,’” Kreinan says.
“When you run short of hands, a child who is capable turns a page in a book for another child, they try to make them laugh, they fall in love with the younger kids, everyone turns to mush,” says Brunie, who came to the school to work temporarily one summer and declared she was never, ever leaving.
“We’re teachers, nurturers, psychiatrists, mothers,” Lieberman adds.
In another classroom, the younger severely disabled kids are sitting in their wheelchairs in a circle as teacher Lorie Lochansky goes around and reads from a picture book about spiders. With the help of paras Bernadette Seibert and Elizabeth Maniace, and frequent substitute teacher Larry Kaplan (a.k.a. “Super Sub”), she gets the children to focus on a toy spider.

A mixed group of K-7 kids are in class with teacher Georgia Ghicas and paras Monica McInerny and Lorraine Kuehnle. The younger students are learning about butterflies and skeletons while the older ones learn about the solar system.
In a small classroom off the kitchen, speech teacher Bonnie Crane works one on one or in small groups. Some of her students use different assistance devices, some are signing, others are verbalizing.
“The hardest part is trying to figure out what a child’s communication system is and then trying to change it so other people will understand that child,” Crane says.
“When they can communicate and other people can understand, that’s everything to me. Lately, because there are new devices and adaptive switches to make the computer more accessible, the children are finding more success. They have control. When they realize they have control, their faces light up, I know I’ve reached them, and that’s success,” she says.
Kathryn Sabotka, a new teacher who works with the severely disabled older kids along with paras Nicole Connolly, Jennifer Garren and Judy Weinstein, agrees that communication is the big goal.
“We also have fun helping the students progress, we’re a great team. The kids love learning and they love school.”
There’s some fun going on outside as adaptive physical education teacher Rose-Ann Trascoy and para Weinstein help wheelchair-bound students maintain whatever muscles they can with inventive exercises. The two work on eye-hand coordination as they get kids to interact with a ball.
Some students at PS 23 are boys who once played quarterback and can no longer hold a football or no longer know what a football is; their beautiful athletic bodies beginning to atrophy, their hands already curling inward, a cloth tucked gently under their necks by teachers and paras to catch the strings of saliva. Yesterday it was sports, girls, college applications and cars. Today it’s a wheelchair and diapers for the rest of their lives.
“It’s humbling for all of us, what can happen to anyone in a heartbeat,” says Shelley Ronik, unit coordinator. Like office assistant Margaret Sehlmeyer, she’s right in there with the kids, the teachers, the flow of things. Compassion comes with the job description.

“Ninety percent of the general ed kids come in very angry. Who wouldn’t be? They don’t want to be in a hospital,” says Kreinan. “Then they blossom, they realize they can earn their high school credits, they crack a smile.”
Kreinan and paras Brunie and Lieberman are known to sing and dance until those kids crack a smile and even laugh.
They keep up their spirits as they teach children that society would like to forget: an inner-city kid who was knifed and lost his eyeball, a boy who had the left side of his skull crushed in an accident, another who was shot in the brain on a basketball court, was in a coma for weeks and wants to go to college but can’t, the ones “who go from dead to walking and talking, which is good, but have trouble adjusting from being functional to having neurological damage,” Kreinan says.
Unit coordinator Ronick talks about a child “who was sent down from the heavens.”
Multiply disabled, she arrived immaculately dressed, in pain from head to toe and did nothing but moan and cry.
“Over time we watched her emerge from a closed bud into a beautiful flower,” Ronick says. “But one day her para brought her to my office in tears. The girl said that her mom was in a car accident and she didn’t know what happened to her.
“It turned out that her mother was fine. But later that day she asked to speak with me again. She wanted to apologize for upsetting me. After the scare she had, the whole emotional day, she was thinking of me!
“That’s just one example of the essence of our beautiful children.”