Oral History Interview with Lois Combs Weinberg

LOIS WEINBERG: What are we going to talk about?

CASSIE MULLINS: Well, we're going to talk about a lot of things. [Laughter] First of all, I need to say that today's date is August the eleventh, nineteen ninety-eight. And just go ahead and state your name.

LOIS WEINBERG: This is Lois Weinberg.

C.M.: Okay, Lois we want to start out talking to you about, we are going to kind of talk about the East Kentucky Tutorial Program and the James Still Learning Center. But, let's just start out with from a long time ago, how did things get started with this? I know you say, that you started out, you as parents got together, dealing with different things, but we just want people to understand how all this started, 1:00the dyslexic program started going in Knott County.

WEINBERG: Well, it really does have to go back to the fact that our son Jed, when he was eight years old, was diagnosed with dyslexia at the Cincinnati Center for Developmental Disorders. And the pediatrician who diagnosed him, said that there was a program in Louisville that actually could provide the sort of remedial work that he needed to do. And both she and I knew there wasn't anything like that in eastern Kentucky, and not even really in Lexington. So, the more, I had no choice, but to look into what was going on in Louisville. And once I did, I realized that the model, which was based on parent involvement, was designed so that parents reached out to other parents, in order to form a group that then learned how to do tutoring, one-on-one tutoring. And 2:00in fact, parents were given the instruction and the supervision to tutor another person's child, not their own, but another person's child in very specific, intense, language-oriented material that had been developed specifically to deal with the deficits that dyslexic children exhibit academically. And this had been based on research that was going on for thirty or forty years. And it came to a head when Doctor Charles Shed developed the materials and the methodology, the instructional techniques during the summers of the late nineteen sixties, in response to parents who like I, had been terribly desperate 3:00as to what they could do ...

C.M.: Yeah, to help their kids.

WEINBERG: ...to help their kids. There have always been expensive, elite, private institutions, but not in Kentucky. So even if you could afford something, you would have to send your child a long way away, no matter what age they were, if they were going to get this kind of remediation. So, this was the response of how to get it done, knowing that the public schools were not equipped and even the private schools in Kentucky were not equipped to give the specific instruction that our children basically needed to reach their potential.

C.M.: So, how did that, you started out, like you said, because of Jed's problem and you wanted to help him. How did you transfer that information to here in Knott County, here at home?

WEINBERG: I went Cassie, and stood at the door, doors of the Emmolina School and talked to parents, just from conversation that I had heard about whose child 4:00was having difficulty in school or whose child was having reading problems. At that time that was like in the mid-seventies, there weren't even special education programs that were full blown and operating in classrooms across the county. So, I mean there were no alternatives. So, I would identify these parents and I just kind of sidled up to them and get a conversation started and pretty soon, you know, they were saying, "yeah my child's really having difficulty reading. I know he's smart. I know, you know, I've tried to do what I could do, and he's still failing." And so I would say, "well we're going to have an informational meeting at the library such and such a day and blah, blah, blah." And pretty soon we had an informational meeting of about forty to fifty parents assembled. 5:00And a lady from Louisville came and spoke to us, and told us what the tutorial program was all about and how we went about it. I went to Louisville for the training. And then [it] was required to tutor in one of their programs and actually drove to Georgetown and back on Tuesdays for many weeks, during the semester that I was learning how to tutor at another program. And then the following summer, I went for further instruction in Louisville. And basically just came back and gathered together fifteen parents and we started a tutoring, the tutoring process.

C.M.: So where did you all do this, where did you do this? Like you said, there's not like you had your own classroom or anything.

WEINBERG: We started basically in the old library here at the settlement and as your dad is fond of saying, the roof was leaking and all of the electric lights didn't work, and the heat was pretty spotty. I remember bundling up a whole lot that first semester. 6:00And we stayed here and then basically your dad closed this building, so we took our satchels with materials the next semester and went to the May Stone Building and then the library and then the Human Services Building. We were all over Knott County, really.

C.M.: Kind of like nomads. [Laughing] WEINBERG: Nomads. We had our little satchels with materials, and we would do our training at the May Stone Building in the spring and the fall. And then eventually, you know, we started the summer school program, because a few, my child and others, went to the Louisville program, but it cost twelve hundred dollars. And then you had the rooming situation, because they didn't have a boarding program. Even the Knott County school system paid for a couple of kids to attend. But it was clear that was not a workable solution. So, I remember your dad saying one night 7:00at a get together, "well, if they can do it in Louisville, we can do it in Hindman better." So that was sort of the beginning of the summer school program, and the Louisville folks helped us with, you know, basically the supervision and the administration of the first year, which was over in the old Hindman High School, which you talk about really dilapidated at that point. I mean the bathrooms were abysmal, and of course the classrooms weren't so hot either. I mean they were hot, because it was summer and there was no air conditioning. [Laughter] But that was where we had the first summer school and we just managed to keep on having them ever since. Eventually, I don't know if you want to talk about this, in nineteen eighty-five, we decided that we needed to be able to do our own screening process. 8:00C.M.: Yeah, let's do talk about that, because we have kind of been talking about you all were learning this from other people and incorporating it.

WEINBERG: We kept running to Louisville, running to Louisville, running to Louisville, leaving at four in the morning to get to a workshop by eight-thirty. And eventually we really felt like we had accomplished and learned what we were supposed to learn. So, several of us discovered that we could get some training in how to screen children from a Doctor Thomas Hawkem, who was at that time, and I think he still is, at Murray State University. And that we could go to the Mayfield school where Mrs. Cole was doing business, way down in far, western Kentucky.

C.M.: That's a long way.

WEINBERG: And she was willing to share with us, her materials, and to get Doctor Hawkem, who worked with her program, to come and train us in how to screen kids. So, I called six people, and one person couldn't go. And it was pretty amazing that the other 9:00five people could go and were willing to make a commitment to do this. And we piled in Jean Johnson's van and left our families for a week and went to Mayfield and took classes from Doctor Hawkem in the evening and maybe sometimes early in the morning. And then we worked in their school, sort of as a practicum. And then a follow up with him in the evening on assessments and techniques. It was an intense week. I remember that wasn't a dorm situation, we slept on the floors on air mattresses. [Laughing] That was back in the days when we were full of vim and vigor. [Laughter] C.M.: You don't want to talk bad about yourself, now.

WEINBERG: This was 10:00when we were open to new experiences and adventures. And so we finished and we came back home. And we started doing the screening, which had typically been done by the Louisville program.

C.M.: And the screening, that's what determines whether a child has these characteristics?

WEINBERG: That's right. We use thirteen different exercises with the children and they are standardized. And we look for a pattern of academic perceptual inability, language performance on these measures. And then determine whether or not what's happening academically is due to perceptual difficulties or is it happening because of emotional or behavior sorts of disorders, that really we're not designed 11:00to work with. And then we give the parents that information and they go from there.

C.M.: So, after you all got this training and things from Murray State and you could do the screenings, was it as if now, you were kind of like self-contained here in Knott County? You could determine whether a child needed help and you could provide help, is that correct?

WEINBERG: That's right. And we did the workshops and we did the readouts and we basically started just doing our own thing. And then somewhere around nineteen eighty-eight, we kept hearing from teachers, who were involved in the after school program. And in fact, Ruby Jacobs was one of the ones, who during those days, was very, very active in the after school program. She would continue to say, "I know they've been to after school and summer school, but when they come back 12:00to a classroom, they're still not ready to function." And in those days, Cassie, really the leadership of the EKTP was heavy with teachers. And teachers who had their own children, who were failing in regular classrooms, because they hadn't had the specific attention that they needed. And the teachers who realized that the teachers had not been trained to give it.

C.M.: Right. They didn't know how.

WEINBERG: They did not know how, so they didn't hold their colleagues, you know, responsible exactly, but they also knew that something else needed to happen. And they were willing to make the sacrifice of time and energy and effort to get trained just like any other parent to administer this very specific, multi-sensory, 13:00linguistically based, very structured instruction for the children. And each one of those words is laden with a whole piece, a whole segment of methodology. And it is integrated in a way that simply doesn't happen when you use worksheets to take care of the visual thing, or you sing songs to do the auditory. But what we do is very carefully integrated to happen simultaneously in a multi-sensory way. So that the visual system and the auditory and the tactile are all integrated at the same time. And it is a quite different process than I've seen anywhere. And I've made a, I've made a career of going to a variety of private, public schools, schools of education 14:00and it's simply not done this way.

C.M.: Right. Well, let's talk a little bit about, because we've kind of just touched base on how things began. Like you said, with your son and then parents and teachers. Let's talk a little bit, now we have the full time school here at the James Still Learning Center. How did that start coming together? Because that was, it is a big deal still. But I remember even then, it was like wow, you can talk about things. But how did you all get that going?

WEINBERG: Well, in the late eighties, as I said, there was a growing awareness that there was still a big need, that we weren't meeting. And we went to the DePaul School in Louisville and 15:00struck up a relationship with them. And basically they had been using this methodology and material since Doctor Shed. And he actually had worked with Sister Enrita Mauk, in developing their school. He had trained parents, a parent based group, called the Kentucky Shed Association now, in how to do this, with after school programs and summer school programs. But at the same time he was working with educators like Sister Enrita to develop a full curriculum and full time approach. So it was really two different branches of his original work that we began with and then followed through with, in getting back to the DePaul School. And basically I remember another trip in Jean Johnson's van to Louisville. [Laughing] And we looked at the DePaul School and were just really impressed with what they were able to do. And they basically are a private institution. And we felt a lot 16:00of similarity with them in many ways. And we came away from saying that, from saying "well, if they can do it in Louisville, so can we." And they had actually just undergone an endowment drive and had finished some renovation work on their old building, which seemed awfully tempting, because we still had the original library building here at the settlement, that everybody wanted to preserve, everybody wanted to keep as part of the settlement school tradition. So, the two tracks of wanting to provide more services for children with dyslexic characteristics, and wanting to preserve the library seemed to be coming together. So all we needed was six or seven hundred thousand dollars. [Laughing) C.M.: Oh, no school yet.

WEINBERG: So, you know how your dad is, he began figuring out which foundations 17:00could be approached and I was dispatched to the Appalachian Fund and he did a lot of work with the Steel-Reese people and Ashland Oil. And it just went from one thing to another. I think that the Appalachian Regional Commission gave money. Your dad would have to get out the list to show you where all the donations came from, but over a period of about maybe a year and a half or two years those began to trickle in. And we decided to go forward, even before we had the last of what we needed. And the design work was begun with Randy Burchett as to how to ....I remember John Priest walking through the building. And we were trying to figure out what we could save of the old and what we had to 18:00do. I remember John was really concerned, now if you're going to have level floors and corners that meet, you're going to have to tear all of the floor out and start from scratch. And we talked about trying to save the original arches on the interior of the front hallway, but it just wasn't possible, in order to maximize the space. But we did determine that we could save the exterior and the original fireplace of the original building. Then we could expand the roof, in order to get a full upstairs.

C.M.: Right. Because before it wasn't really ....

WEINBERG: It wasn't. And John again was able to see that if you put dormers or whatever on the second floor, that allows you so many more square feet on the second floor. So, we basically figured out the interior of the old part and then we realized that we had to bust out of the stone in the rear, and 19:00make a connection to a new section, that would extend as far back as possible to where there would be a drive that went from the parking lot up to the main road. So, the board gave approval and support. They were fabulous. I remember Jimmy Coddell was saying, you got to have a dream, you got to have a vision, we need to be doing these things. Carol Coddell actually was on the Board, but Jimmy was a contractor and he thought big. And they were wonderful in really having faith in us, that we could actually pull it off and not leave the settlement school with some huge debt.

C.M.: Right.

WEINBERG: Which is actually the way it happened. Ultimately the gifts and donations kept 20:00trickling in and nothing was taken from the Hindman Settlement School endowment or operating, well maybe some operating funds got shuffled around. But basically the endowment was never touched.

C.M.: And that's quite an accomplishment with such a big project.

WEINBERG: It really is, but then we didn't have any students.

C.M.: Right. How did you all go about that? Because like you said, this is a full time school.

WEINBERG: And we are a unique operation, because we are neither really in the full time school, neither public nor private.

C.M.: Exactly.

WEINBERG: And really, except for the School for the Blind and the School for the Deaf in Kentucky, or there used to be one in Northern Kentucky for Retarded Children, called the Redwood School. But basically there are no other institutions to my knowledge, in Kentucky like this. But we wanted to be 21:00in co-operation with the local school districts. And Joe Graves on the board, always kept reminding us, our job was to reach out into the schools and to let them know that we are available as an extended service of their programs. And so we did a lot of spade work and inviting them to come, directors of special ed. and the principals and the superintendents to come visit. And we talked about what our program would be after we opened the facility. And ultimately we ended up in the beginning with about seven children, who basically were private placements at that point. The first year there was no public money involved. And the settlement, that's probably where the operational money came in. The settlement footed the bill for the first teacher. And I guess that first year, we had Laura Hoffman, 22:00who was a volunteer if not through the Mennonite Committee, through the Catholic Services Committee.

C.M.: Yeah, I remember her. I can't remember exactly what she was though.

WEINBERG: And so, basically that was our first staff. And then Amy Dailey volunteered mostly as secretary and I think the first three years, your dad insisted that I be on as a paid staff, which I ultimately decided, I was taking care of two or three different jobs and I'd just as soon be a volunteer and let somebody else have the salary and do half of what I was doing. And then I'd just volunteer and do the rest. [Laughing] But the first year, I think I was part of the paid staff. But those children came from Perry County and from Knott County and from Floyd County. 23:00And they were children who had been involved in the summer school program and in the after school, whose parents were desperate. And they knew that their children were just sinking and they were going to totally bomb out. And we took them and we began developing a curriculum and still using the basic methodology and basically using the same approach to language, but expanding the curriculum in a much more hands on kind of way, with all subject content. And that was in nineteen ninety. That was in nineteen ninety. And then we dedicated the building, I believe, 24:00the fall of nineteen ninety-one. I think we actually were operating for some months before we .... No, I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

C.M.: I can't remember. I mean, I was there.

WEINBERG: We dedicated the building in ninety-one, I know, because it was the October before my dad's accident in December. And then our doors opened, I believe in January of ninety-two, if I'm not mistaken. And it was these seven or eight children that came to us that first semester. And then we realized we had to get busy and figure out how to institutionalize this and get approval from the state board, which was another whole saga of high level bureaucracy and negotiations and trying to generate support. And I must say that Tom Gish, who was a board member from Letcher County, state board member from Letcher County, and Wade Mount, who was a board 25:00member who I had known through the Pritchard Committee, were our champions. And they rallied support for us, so that when we went to ask for approval from the state board as a non-public institution, they were there to support and make sure that in fact, we were given that approval. But that was not easy, because the state bureaucracy did not even really have an up-to-date procedure for approval of non-public schools. And we had gotten the run around for about three or four years previously.

C.M.: Yeah, I'd say so.

WEINBERG: We couldn't even find an application that was up-to-date. And then when we got the application, nobody knew what was supposed to happen with it. So, at one level, we sort of pushed the bureaucracy to 26:00provide an approved path for what we were doing. And we were determined to do that. Because we wanted to follow the rules and regulations and be certified and equipped to handle special education students, as well as non-special education students. That was critical. But even after we had that approval, the local districts really didn't buy in. All of the territoriality from teachers and administrators, these are our children, we can take of them. We've got special ed. degrees in all of these things and we can take care of these children. And in fact, it was only really when parents would continue to push, either at 27:00the building level with principals and teachers, or when they finally went to the Knott County School Board, as a group of maybe four or five, and actually told their stories about individual children who were not being served. That got the Knott County Board of Education's attention and those board members said--you know, politically they could see, they needed to respond to these parents, because they weren't going away. And they instructed the administrators to develop procedures for children to be accepted in this school. So, negotiating with the state board, in making sure the legalities were written, worked out, and the State Department of Education's Special Ed. department, 28:00and the local districts, got to be a pretty squirrely process.

C.M.: Oh, yeah, I'd say so.

WEINBERG: And we had their lawyers and Knott County lawyers screaming and saying private schools can't get public money. And finally Doctor Bosen, Tom Bosen, who had come in to administer, be Kentucky's first Commissioner of Education after Kentucky's Education Reform Act was passed in nineteen ninety. We got his attention and he said, "okay we are going to have a meeting in Frankfort and the appropriate people from Knott County, superintendent, Special Ed director," the appropriate people from the department, all got together in one little room. And your dad and I walked in, and I knew that things 29:00were going to be better, because for the first time they offered us a cup of coffee.

C.M.: That was a good sign.

WEINBERG: That was a good sign. And before we left, the instructions were given that this is legal, go home and work out the process and the procedures and submit it to the Department of Special Ed. and we'll let you know any sort of revisions. So we came home and did that and that's when, actually I think it was the then Superintendent of Knott County schools, Harold Combs, who came up with the idea, that we could run the financial part of this through the Kentucky Valley Education Co-op, which the surrounding districts were already using for special programs. And this would just be an additional special program.

C.M.: Hold on just a second.

END OF TAPE 20 A 49, LOIS WEINBERG, SIDE 30:00A BEGINNING OF TAPE 20 A 49, LOIS WEINBERG, SIDE B C.M.: Turn it back on.

WEINBERG: Side two?

C.M.: Side two. [Laughter] WEINBERG: But Harold Combs thought that the Kentucky Valley Co-op was maybe the answer to figuring out how to make this happen, that would not be, would not require transfer of public funds to the settlement school, which administers its funds under a 501 K3? 3K, whatever. And that's the way we worked it out. And we wrote up contracts for districts to make with Kentucky Valley Co-op and then the settlement made a contract also 31:00with the co-op. So, basically the three thousand dollars that was the agreed upon price in nineteen ninety-one is still the price in nineteen ninety-eight, even though that is below what the districts get for an average daily attendance amount for kids that come to their school. So they are still retaining some of the funding, particularly here in Knott County, because the kids don't get any extra transportation funds. Now in some of the other counties, the kids are entitled, if they come here, they're entitled to transportation, which then is an additional cost.

C.M.: Oh that's good.

WEINBERG: So, the process was, 32:00and this was laid out as a possibility under education reform, that a site committee could be convened. And I remember Ann Titsworth and Kathy Eversole and I met for dinner at the Courthouse Cafe and worked out these details. [Laughing] But a site committee made up of a principal, the child's teacher, the child's parent and somebody from the James Still Learning Center can get together and make the decision, after looking at everybody's information, that the best placement for this child is the James Still Learning Center. And they can be either non-special ed, or they can be special ed. and then the meeting is called an ARC, which is under public law 94142, which is an Admissions Release Committee. Basically they are the same thing, it just depends on what sort of designation the child has been given, if any. So, that was the process in how the child can get from a public school 33:00to the full time school.

C.M.: Well, looking back on all this now, I mean I know that we've kind of done all this rather quickly, explaining it, but I think that we've got the important part from how all this started from you worried about Jed, [Laughter] to now here we are in nineteen ninety-eight with a full time school. And of course the settlement school has this connection with the school because of the building and because that's just where you all happened to end up. How important do you think that that's been? That the settlement school is connected with the James Still Learning Center. What does that, in your opinion?

WEINBERG: Well basically, without the settlement school's foundation of administrative and funding sources, what both our staff and parent groups have been able to do, would not have been able to function at all. Because 34:00if we had had to raise the funds, even to keep the lights on, and in the beginning the settlement school service was just secretarial, phone calls and helping organize meetings and workshops and obtaining materials and just on and on and on. I'm here to tell you as the director of an after school program for many years, and then the director of a summer school program, there is no way you can do the work that's required by the program and raise money. You can help and you can facilitate and you can make contacts, but to do that on top of actually running the program, it's just not possible. And so the settlement school as an institutional base that's been here with a tradition of providing service for Appalachian kids, 35:00you know, the marriage was perfect. Because the kids we are talking about are from this area and this region and that's our mission. We figured out how to do the content and the curriculum and provide the outreach, that the settlement school hasn't paid for. So, you see at the same time that the settlement has provided a base of funding and institutional support, at the same time there has been a tremendous amount of volunteer input from parents and teachers, for years, that's priceless. There's no way the settlement could have paid for all of that either. So, you see, it was a beautiful marriage, those who could provide certain things and those who could provide other things, getting together. The popular term now, I'm about tired of hearing it, is collaboration. [Laughter] 36:00And in fact this is the perfect example of what real collaboration can evolve into, and it is still working that way. The after school program has basically operated through the leadership and through the volunteer efforts of countless numbers of parents. And the settlement school provides the workshop and some of the material and support staff, like the secretary. But basically, the after school program has been self sufficient, in fact the tuition which is fifty dollars a semester and always has been, originally went half to settlement and half to the program. Now that tuition just goes to the program.

But there isn't any 37:00other direct source of funding, has not been from the settlement school.

END OF INTERVIEW