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Thursday, August 28, 2008 | |||||||||
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Sarah and Rose Jane's Vision
Rose Jane Townsend By Sarah Littlefield, Executive Director Back in 1969, my mother Rose Jane Townsend decided to retire from teaching reading in Hudson High School and start her own learning center. She wanted to help children and adults with reading and other learning problems. At the time I was an English teacher in a suburban junior high school and taught reading part-time. I had enrolled at Kent State University in a masters program to get my reading certificate. This, by the way, was no coincidence. I had taught reading with her in summer school and found that we both shared a love for helping the underdog, for showing poor readers a way to increase their ability to read and learn. When my mother talked about setting up a tutorial business my own entrepreneurial juices started flowing. Besides, I felt I could help her because I was setting up a "reading lab," as they called it in the '70s, in the junior high, so I was aware of the latest books and machines that were currently in vogue for remedial reading. We decided that I would work for her in her new enterprise after school and on Saturdays. Innocently, with no real foresight, we did a lot of things right from the beginning despite the fact that we were a businessman's nightmare: no business plan, no financial thinking. We had only a desire to help people and an intuition to make it work. As a minister's wife, my mother quickly saw the folly in trying to tutor out of the house that happened to be a parsonage owned by the church. An old, gorgeous Victorian mansion, our house would have been an appealing place for kids to come, but we needed to avoid conflict with the church deacons who would have questioned running a business out of the parsonage. And, more importantly, our work never would have become a business. It would have stayed a nice little tutoring service in a home, where we would have served one student at a time. Luckily, my dad talked her out of tutoring in the home and suggested that she find some space in town to rent. She found a long train-car shaped space up a tall narrow staircase above a store. She scraped together $5000 to cover some used desks and chairs, and some books. She splurged on a multisensory phonetic program called Gillingham-Stillman, which everyone who was anyone in reading circles knew was THE program for students with severe reading problems. To this day, those Gillingham books and flash cards have a special place on our bookshelves; they remain a viable system for teaching decoding, but more importantly, they provide a fond reminder of the early days when my mother and I worked side by side to actualize a dream we shared. Rose Jane and I planned and tinkered and built a fine learning center in the next five years. We branched into other areas beyond reading, following closely the new field of learning disabilities. We hired several part-time teachers, a secretary, and a bookkeeper. We incorporated; we opened a bank account, we were, in fact, a business. We found our pleasure out of the work we did best: helping children, adolescents, and adults read better, spell better, write better, and understand math better. We had all kinds of clients: adults and pre-schoolers, failing students and good students wanting to be great students. My mother gained a reputation in Chagrin Falls and the surrounding areas for being an outspoken advocate for kids whose needs were not being met in the schools. Some of the statements she made really rattled the school psychologists and principals, but she knew what she was talking about. Before there was any kind of organized effort to identify and help the learning disabled, these students usually were labeled as dumb or lazy or unmotivated. My mother felt that it was her role not only to educate parents about learning problems and how to deal with them, but to inform the schools as well. To that effort, she offered community seminars on reading and learning problems. After two years of success in testing and tutoring, we grew into a large enough business for me to quit my job and work full time at the Center. I was ecstatic! Now I could do what I loved with the person I loved best in the world. We moved our Center to a building that overlooked the falls in the center of town, providing us with a splendid view! In those two years we laughed a lot, cried some, and drove my father and brother crazy at family gatherings "talking shop." For two more years, we worked side-by-side, Rose Jane doing the diagnostic testing and prescribing a remedial plan, and me teaching students to carry out the plan. I applied what I learned in my masters program, and participated in training the part-time instructors we hired. We got so busy we had to rent additional space on the floor below our office. My mother used this for testing, making room for more students to be tutored above. One afternoon she called me from downstairs, saying, "Look out the window. There is a spectacular piliated woodpecker out there, pecking at a tree." We enjoyed looking at that rare bird, and talking to each other on the phone, and experiencing life together. Little did we know that our time together was to come to an end soon. On January 29th, 1975, in the early morning hours, my mother died from a massive brain aneurysm. No time to prepare, no time to think, just shock that such a vital lady in the peak of health would just drop out of our lives without saying good-bye. I didn't know what to think except that I missed her more than words could say, and that I would continue the work of this learning center to make sure that her mission was carried out. |
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