From the Journal Sentinel
Nov. 18, 1999
In fairly short order, depression turned
Kate Leung from a girl who was a standout at a private school into a girl
unwelcome at that school.
In slow and patient order, Kradwell School
works with kids such as Kate, aiming to bring them around to academic
success.
Recent decades have brought a huge boom in
special education in public schools. What to do with children who don't
fit the conventional patterns has become one of the shaping issues for
schools, not only in terms of education itself but in terms of budgets,
space in buildings and hiring of staff.
Yet for all that has been done, there are
kids who aren't finding in conventional schools a setting in which they
can get on track. Students who have problems such as emotional
disturbances, behavioral disorders and depression present some of the most
difficult challenges to schools.
That's where Kradwell comes in for 28
public school districts that have placed students at Kradwell from as far
away as Port Washington and Watertown. Public schools pay for about 60% of
the school's 105 students, while the remainder enroll privately (tuition
is $6,200 a year).
Kradwell was originally the school for
young in-patients at the Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital in Wauwatosa, but
it has shifted over the last 20 years to being strictly a program for
students living in the community.
Principal Mark Bialzik says the school
generally has classes with no more than five students. It operates on a
three-hour school day, with about 50 students coming in the morning and
another 50 in the afternoon. The school serves seventh- through
12th-graders.
Bialzik says the school's approach to
education aims to be both very calm and very structured, although hardly
regimented. Students and staff are on a first-name basis, dress is very
casual. In the short term, expectations are tailored to what is
appropriate for a student and effort counts, perhaps more than at other
schools.
In the long run, Bialzik says the school
has a 98% success rate in getting students to graduation, meeting the same
standards as the schools they came from.
Bialzik says one of the hallmarks of the
school is that, on the part of both teachers and kids, the atmosphere is
very accepting of all students, many of whom have been taunted or treated
poorly in the social life of their prior schools.
"We don't give up very easily
here," he says. "When someone comes into Kradwell, they just
know we're going to stick it out with them."
- Alan J. Borsuk
©1999 Journal Sentinel Inc., reproduced
with permission
