Principal Deena Kotak often relies on the word “complex” when talking about her school and the needs of its children.
She is responsible for Lord Beaconsfield Elementary at Penticton and East 20th and its annex — Alderwood Family Development Centre — five blocks away on Kaslo and East 18th.
“Complex” is a forgivable default for Kotak given she’s responsible for the education of some of the most emotionally damaged children in the entire Vancouver school district.
“These kids (in Alderwood) have very complex lives and some very sad things have happened to them. They are the most challenging kids in the district,” Kotak says.
Many are in foster care and their emotional problems are beyond the coping levels of their neighbourhood schools.
“Alderwood’s a combined effort of the school district, Vancouver Coastal Health and the Ministry of Children and Families. These are very vulnerable learners and we are trying to give them as much support as we can,” she says.
One of the main supports is a sensory room, a place where children suffering emotional meltdowns can go to recover their equilibrium.
“These are children struggling with self-regulation issues who have experienced trauma in their lives. When they are upset they can’t name it. They just explode.”
Such outbursts can result in violence, children lashing out, furniture being broken, or a child running from school. Kotak has to deal with a major incident at least once a week.
So her favourite quotation is mounted near her desk: “The kids that need the most love will ask for it in the most unloving ways.”
“It’s all true,” she says. “I look at that when I’m having a frustrating day.”
She doesn’t believe in restraint and seclusion when dealing with violent outbursts.
“We are trying to be proactive, find different ways. At Alderwood we are creating a sensory room that will have physical and visual aids that can be part of a student’s sensory diet. These are good kids but they need help.”
However, the sensory room is short of equipment. It has a swing that needs attaching to the ceiling, a few large balls, some balance boards, a cylindrical tunnel a child can hide in, an exercise bike and that’s about it.
Alderwood program director Lisa Lowe has list of what the room needs: a fibre-optic light spray, a solar projection kit, a waterless rainbow tube and a milky way carpet for a total of $6,200. She also needs money to have the swing mounted.
On top of that Kotak said Alderwood needs an interactive white board “to help teach these children, because we are not just trying to keep them quiet.”
Over in the main school she faces a similar problem. Beaconsfield has a significant number of vulnerable learners among its 200 students — about 25 per cent — and the technology to help them is crumbling.
“Learning presents a challenge to a lot of our students. I have one kid who had to write something but he just shut down because the idea of picking up a pen is too much. He can type, so if you put him in front of a classroom computer it takes away one of the major layers preventing his access to learning.
“But we don’t have a computer lab anymore. The computers we have are old and have stopped working or take 10 minutes to boot up and sometimes just shut down.”
The PAC (parents advisory council) works hard to provide the school with extras, said Kotak, but there is only so much that can be expected as the school is small.
So what could she use?
“Honestly? two laptops for our nine classes. I know it’s a lot but it would really help us and if we had 60 more iPads we would have one for every two students.”
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THE 2011 SCHOOL YEAR had barely begun at Admiral Seymour elementary when teacher Carrie Gelson, frustrated after a difficult day at work, wrote an impassioned open letter to Vancouver residents questioning whether anyone cared about her inner-city students who were coming to school with empty tummies and holes in their shoes.
On the day The Vancouver Sun published her letter, when she arrived at the East Vancouver school, “People had already dropped off thousands of dollars in cash by that time.”
So we told her story, introducing readers to her children. And because you began donating money, clothing, school equipment and field trips, by the spring of 2013, the donations were close to $1 million to Adopt-a-School. The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund matched some of those donations for a total of $1.3 million.
Because of you, hundreds of Vancouver-area schoolchildren now have boots to wear in the rain, warm breakfasts and are experiencing things they would never have otherwise.
For more than three decades, you have enabled The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund to raise than $11.5 million, of which more than $7 million has been distributed to nearly 1,000 non-profit children’s charities in B.C.
The season of giving is once again upon us, and we're hoping you'll contribute to Adopt-a-School to keep alive this great legacy that we both started so many years ago.
