Students with learning challenges find a place to thrive at Oakland’s Bayhill High.
Physics teacher Scott DeFalco whirls a plastic thermos around on a string; the thermos circles quickly, barely clearing the classroom’s ceiling. DeFalco is explaining centripetal and centrifugal force to five 11th-graders at Bayhill High, a private school for students with language-based learning disorders now wrapping up its first year in Oakland.
Sitting right over their desks or leaning back in wooden chairs, the kids eagerly call out questions: “What did you mean ‘it’s not a real force’? Can you give us examples of centripetal and centrifugal?” DeFalco smiles and explains again. “Centripetal is a force pulling in; if the string breaks and the jug goes flying, there’s no more centripetal force.” He draws a diagram of the thermos and the string on the board, and continues the lesson.
Bayhill students expect instruction like this, with concrete examples, visual aids, patience and good humor. And schools like Bayhill are crucial for the roughly 15 percent of children with learning disabilities, who may be highly intelligent but have trouble learning in a more traditional school setting. Ninth-grader Sam C. from Alameda, for example, says that before Bayhill, she “always felt pressure in school. People thought I was stupid just because I couldn’t understand things as quickly as others.”
But at Bayhill, Sam feels like she belongs. “It’s a great experience to meet other kids with learning disabilities,” she says, flashing a warm smile.
Sam is one of the 54 students attending Bayhill High, the only program of its kind in the East Bay. Housed in a cozy, three-story building on a hilly residential street near Lake Merritt, Bayhill opened its doors last September to replace Raskob High, which closed abruptly in June 2007 after just two years.
Along with a full academic curriculum, Bayhill offers on-site educational therapy, speech therapy and counseling to teens with dyslexia, dysgraphia, visual or auditory processing disorder, attention deficit disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, school anxiety or mild depression. Each class is divided into one section for college prep and another that’s more remedial and supportive. A student who is adept with numbers but struggles with language will be in one section for math, another for English.
Perhaps Bayhill’s greatest gift to students is to engender the feeling that everyone belongs and that everyone is a “regular” kid. “There’s not a lot of stigmatization here,” says Bayhill’s executive director Rachel Wylde. “It’s a relief knowing that others have had similar struggles.”
In a traditional setting, notes Michael Perna, Bayhill’s board vice chair, some kids with learning differences act out and some get shy, “but they all feel bad about themselves because everyone else seems to be doing fine. As soon as they’re in an environment where peers are not judgmental, it changes their attitude overnight.”
Parents also appreciate not being judged. Bayhill parents report roadblocks and even hostility as they tried to get help for their children over many years in the education system. A teacher at one school blurted to a parent, “Mothers! Dyslexia is all in your minds, just a way of getting special privileges for your kids.”
Eleventh-grader Michael Dixon, dressed in baggy jeans and a black T-shirt, explains that he needs extra support for his dyslexia and dysgraphia, which is difficulty with writing. [Bayhill] “is great if you need accommodations for your needs,” he says. “You actually know your teachers, and you can’t slip through the cracks.”
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Raskob High—Bayhill’s predecessor—was a program of Holy Names University and a next step for learning-disabled kids attending the 35-year-old Raskob Day School, explains Wylde, Bayhill’s director. Raskob High had a ninth grade in place and plans to add grades 10 to 12, when Holy Names announced that it would need to reclaim the high school’s space after the close of the 2007 school year last June.
“It came as a shock to all of us,” says Bayhill board chair and former Raskob parent Ken Dreyfuss. The parent community at Raskob High and Day School had been delighted to finally find an educational setting adapted to their kids. David Cohen’s daughter had attended four other schools before she came to Raskob, where the teachers understood that although she appeared “shut down,” she has central auditory processing disorder, which makes it difficult for her to understand both verbal and nonverbal communication.
With 18 months lead time, Wylde and the Raskob parents set about finding a new home for the high school; during this time they formed a board, incorporated as a nonprofit and located a site. And by the end of 2007 they had raised $400,000 in seed money. “One generous donor had a son who never had any support for his learning disability,” Perna says. “She told us that she could see what a place like this could have done for her son and for others.”
Bayhill found its home in a white stucco building owned by the Oakland diocese, originally set up as Our Lady of Lourdes School. Grades nine to 11 are up and running, and grade 12 will be in place by September. Although learning disabilities predominantly affect boys, there is an equal ratio of boys to girls at Bayhill.
“If you take students with a learning disability and put them in a large high school with 30 kids per class and a confusing schedule, it can be overwhelming,” Wylde says. “We see students who are so bright, but were getting F’s and D’s; here they can understand the content and master it.”
Wylde exudes both calm and energy as she leads a tour group through a hall lined with metal lockers into a common room with comfy sofas and round tables. Students mill through in groups of three or four, but the noise level is surprisingly low. Wylde, who has experience both as a special education teacher and a mental health administrator, leads the tour into a light-filled classroom overlooking Lake Merritt. Among the strategies that benefit Bayhill students, she explains, are small classes (a maximum of 10 per class), a multi-sensory teaching approach, repetition of concepts, and specially designed software to help with learning disabilities.
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In his ninth-grade world history class, Patrick Clifton offers a multi-sensory lesson to explain the theory of civilizations set forth in the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. He shows a film based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning book and leads a discussion enhanced by Johnny West action figures, stuffed animals and food items (beef and pork vs. nuts and berries). Clifton reinforces his points on a written flow chart laid out to correspond with the classroom lesson.
All of the Raskob High School teachers followed Wylde to Bayhill. “The teachers work their hearts out; they put in the extra mile,” says 11th-grader Dixon.
“They’re patient; they’ll repeat information over and over again,” says ninth-grader Sam. “They’ll even eat lunch with you.”
The staff also works collaboratively. The history, art and English teachers, for example, each explored different aspects of the Indian epic poem, “Ramayana,” and the kids created their own shadow puppets, wrote a script and held a performance. Exams and homework are coordinated to prevent overload, and homework is limited to one-and-a-half hours per night, unlike the three to four hours common in many schools. For kids who don’t finish their homework, rather than punishment Bayhill provides help and structure through an after-school homework club or lunch study group.
“For our kids, time and flexibility are key,” says Wylde. One girl, described as a visual thinker, created a large poster-board with factual information in place of a written essay. Wylde is working on setting up educational software that offers organizational help, reads text aloud or enables kids to dictate their writing. Her goal is to encourage students to experiment and then decide whether particular software works for them. But in a broader sense, she’s striving to empower students: she wants them to understand their own learning issues, to feel encouraged and positive and to assess which strategies help. “It’s a huge mountain to climb in four years,” Wylde says, “to be able to discuss their needs and to advocate for themselves.”
Tenth-grader Kerrigan Addicott-Case is partway there. He says that at his previous public school, “only my language teachers acknowledged that people learn in different ways. Now I realize that this is a real thing; one in seven people on average [has] a learning difference.”
Wylde sees well beyond academics; she enthusiastically describes Bayhill’s after-school activities, which include sports, yearbook, martial arts and an active cheerleading squad. In three separate conversations, Wylde and two students mention that Bayhill’s flag football team has just won the league championship. (“We went into four overtimes,” says Sam, one of two girls on the team.) Bayhill has no tryouts or grade point average requirement for sports; any student willing to commit can play. Perna recalls that in response to a survey about typical high school experiences like yearbook, prom and sports, “the parents downplayed those things, but the kids wanted them.” By including these elements, Perna says, Wylde has created “a total environment for kids in which to be successful.”
Bayhill’s first class of seniors will graduate next year, and Wylde expects the majority to go on to a two- or four-year college. “They’ve had the experience of being successful with courses and materials and seeing that college is a real option,” Wylde says. Eleventh-graders also get a taste of the work world: Bayhill’s internship program offers vocational experience in libraries, zoos, animal hospitals and a biodiesel company.
Although Bayhill accommodates kids with a variety of learning differences, the school is not equipped to handle students with autism, developmental delay or moderate to severe emotional or behavioral problems. But even with these restrictions, the need is huge. Due to the scarcity of programs for kids with learning disabilities, students come to Bayhill from as far as San Francisco, Marin and Solano counties.
Board chair Dreyfuss admits to the difficulties of reaching kids from lower-income families. Current tuition is $20,000, although certain services, such as tutoring and psychological counseling, are extra. “We don’t want the school to be just for rich kids,” he says. Scholarships have been built into the budget, and Dreyfuss hopes to create a scholarship endowment. Bayhill is in the process of becoming a certified non-public school, so students with special needs who are referred by their public school district will be able to attend with the district paying the tuition. The school already has eight students attending from nearby public school districts, including Oakland, and some students whose families are reimbursed by their districts. The school also recently received its WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) accreditation.
Perna came up with the school’s name by considering its environment—“connecting the Bay and the hill.” He notes that when they tried out different names on the kids, “the last thing they wanted was something like academy or institute . . . they had a keen ear for anything that smacked of something other than a school for regular kids.”
As DeFalco’s physics class ends, the kids are still puzzling over centripetal force. “Hang in there . . . . I know this is really complicated,” DeFalco reassures his students. “We’ll go over it again tomorrow.”
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Bayhill accepts student applications throughout the year. For more information, call (510) 268-1500 or visit www.bayhillhs.org.
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Rachel Trachten is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to The Monthly.
