Child School Find Island
Ideal Spot for Students
by Gianna Pontecorboli

The river. When you ask one of the teachers at The Child School or Legacy High School why Roosevelt Island is important for their students, the answer is always the same: The river, the space, the sense of security. "For our kids, just looking at the river flowing is relaxing. Sometimes, when one of them has problems, the teacher takes him or her for a walk on the promenade,’’ says Leanne Bloom, the assistant to Director Maari de Souza.

The students looking at the river from their classrooms, however, are not the only signs of this Roosevelt Island success story. The very same kids are the ones who put up Christmas decorations at the Senior Center, do volunteer work at Goldwater Hospital in the afternoon, who stuff and distribute The WIRE, who help with a display for the Roosevelt Island Historical Society.

TCS/Legacy students also show their artwork at Gallery RIVAA and act and sing like sophisticated old professionals at the school’s June show.

Children from the Island’s schools sang Tuesday night for RIOC’s Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony at Blackwell House.

Behind it all is Roosevelt Islander Maari de Souza. Seated behind her desk in her spacious office, this smiling psychologist born in Mumbai, India, doesn’t have a lot of time for visitors. All her time is for about 250 learning-disabled children who attend her elementary, middle and high school – kids who have to fight every day against dyslexia, emotional disturbances, or Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism). "I treat my kids with respect. They have a lot of courage, mostly the youngest,’’ she says.

After graduating with a Ph.D. in Special Education and Psychology at New York University, Maari accepted a teaching job in one of the New York special schools, the Adams School in Manhattan, now closed. But soon, she realized that a lot had to change. "At the time, the terms for diagnosis were ‘brain injured.’ Learning disability is a new term," she says. At a parent’s request, de Souza started a weekly seminar every Saturday and then a little school, in a Roosevelt Island apartment in 1973. There were just five students. She knew what she wanted: a strictly structured school in which each child could have personal attention and a very careful evaluation of his weaknesses and his abilities. "Each one of our students is like a puzzle," says Leanne Bloom. "We have to observe each of them to understand what is working."

For a few years, the expanding school wandered around New York, first to 72nd Street, then 33rd. In 2003, Maari was offered the space once occupied by Roosevelt Island’s PS 217 – four separated edifices which had been neglected after the construction of the new school.

Now, the Child School, the Middle School and the Legacy High School are full of life, students and teachers mingling noisily in the media lab or at the sports clinic, a long line of yellow school buses provided by the City waiting to take them to homes in New York City, but also in Nassau County and in Westchester.

The Child School has nine classes with a total of 78 students. The High School, established in 1996, has 14 classes with a total of 150 students and two different programs, the Regents program preparing for college, and the other, the RCT, enabling the students to earn their high school diploma. Qualified as a non-profit educational institution, the school has a professional staff of 90 teachers and specialists, like psychologists and speech therapists, and just seven administrative assistants. For many students, the tuition is supported by the New York State Education Department. "Eighty-three percent of our students get the Regents or the RCT diploma, compared with 12 to 20 percent of the students enrolled in public special education. We must do something right!’’ says Leanne Bloom.

For Maari de Souza, who still makes a point of meeting each student personally, the reward is in the success stories, which are many. Like John (not his real name), who arrived at the school as a child upset with the entire world and graduated as a candidate for the National Merit Scholarship. Now, he is a student of cinema at New York University.

"Each one of us has his abilities and his weakness. What we need to do is to learn how to teach these kids," says de Souza. "I was just reading poetry by one of our students, age 11. I cannot imagine anybody else able to express himself like this.’’

And the river, of course, helps.