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Wednesday, October 23, 2002

By Deborah Weisberg

Communities offered little for children with special needs when Faith Resnik was born with Down syndrome 38 years ago. But in McKeesport, near her White Oak neighborhood, Bertha Mae Chaplin, a dynamic mother of two with a college degree, had transformed the basement of the First Presbyterian Church into a learning center for exceptional kids, and Resnik was among the first to be enrolled.

	Mimi Marcus, 3, exclaims during a cat-and-mouse game at Long Run Children's Learning Center in McKeesport. (Tony Tye, Post-Gazette)

Today, she earns $7.05 an hour at a Pizza Hut, washing dishes and waiting on tables -- a job she has held for 13 years, her mother, Florence Resnik, said. "She's so proud of where she works. Every time they introduce a new item, she brags about it. She loves it there."

The basement schoolroom where she spent her early years has evolved into the $1.5 million Long Run Children's Learning Center on Long run Road, McKeesport, which celebrated its 40th anniversary Saturday with an open house.

"We want the community to know we've always been here," executive director Tom Smith said. "Our name and location have changed over the years. But we're the same wonderful institution that started in the church basement."

While the effort then was to bring preschoolers often labeled as retarded and kept at home into their communities, facilities such as Long Run now enroll so-called typically developing 3- to 5-year-olds, too. Long Run has 20 openings for such children -- mostly in its new two-day-a-week program, Smith said.

The Allegheny Intermediate Unit funnels more than $600,000 in state and federal funding a year into Long Run's special needs program and encourages the integration of non-special-needs kids. Parents of these children pay $125 a month for the four-day-a-week program. And the school still must raise $25,000 annually to close the gap.

"There are some pretty well-documented benefits for including both populations," Smith said. "Your kid may not need speech therapy, but, if there's a speech therapist in the room doing neat things with other kids, somehow it rubs off. Three-year-olds are learning to talk anyway, and this throws a little extra help their way.

"And sometimes the line between special need and normal development is pretty thin," he said.

The help they need

Originally, the AIU paid the school on a per-student basis through DART -- a special-needs services vehicle that now allocates a lump sum for occupational, speech and physical therapists, special education teachers and aides. Transportation also is provided. There are 60 typically developing kids and 100 with moderate delays.

"We don't usually see kids with extreme physical challenges," Smith said. "We have kids with emotional, social and speech delays, Asperger's syndrome, lead poisoning, Down syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder. ... We're a mid-level service provider. These are not kids with profound needs."

The preschool program offers morning and afternoon sessions, but children can stay extended hours for an additional fee. For those with special needs, the sort of early intervention Long Run provides is believed to lay such an important foundation that a nationwide initiative called Child Find seeks to identify those kids and get them into schools as early as possible, Smith said.

Many of Long Run's students live with foster families.

"A lot of kids aren't getting much attention," Smith said. "And kids need lots and lots of adult attention. They need adults to read stories to them and take them to school, to mediate the world for them in a way that isn't rigid or confining, to tell them they're special and to generate enthusiasm. Some schools provide that and some don't. ... Some preschool programs look like third grade and others are unstructured. We're somewhere in the middle of that."

Long Run begins every day with storytelling or singing and free play. Children are given time to check out their environment, then visit different play stations, for block-building, reading, art and dress-up. There's also gym.

"It's a creative curriculum," Smith said. All activities are supervised by special-education professionals.

Inspiration, determination

The Long Run facility was completed through a capital campaign Chaplin spearheaded five years ago. She retired two years later but has remained active in what began with her vision.

Chaplin was inspired in 1960 as a member of a study group at the First Presbyterian Church, at Market and Sixth streets, by the works of Quaker Elton Trueblood to address unmet needs in her community.

As a graduate of the Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham College, she was trained as a kindergarten teacher and knew she could help kids.

"There was a stigma in society then around those with developmental delays," she said. "Most were kept at home and were driving their parents nuts!"

Besides finding room in the church basement for the half-dozen children who initially enrolled, she called upon friends in child development to volunteer their time.

When the state Welfare Department began providing licensing and funding, Chaplin moved her school to a larger space at the Central Presbyterian Church on Versailles Avenue and hired a small staff to work with the growing number of kids, most of whom had come by doctors' referral.

In the late 1970s, the school moved again, to an old house by the Youghiogheny River in the Boston section of Elizabeth Township.

There it continued for 15 years, also receiving money from the state Education Department, which espoused Chaplin's own philosophy -- that early intervention and efforts to gain community acceptance are critical for kids with special needs.

It made a huge difference for Elizabeth Bendel, now 27, who attended the school at the Central Presbyterian Church until she was 5.

Today, she works at the same church, serving snacks to preschoolers and cleaning. Three nights a week, she has a job at the Palisades, even dressing in country-western garb for dances on Friday nights.

"She communicates well and is good around people, which helps them accept her," said her mother, Rosemary, whose husband, Joseph Bendel, retired as McKeesport mayor two years ago.

"Going to [Long Run] gave her an early start, which was important. Mrs. Chaplin and the other teachers were knowledgeable and kind."

Deborah Weisberg is a freelance writer.