Flexibility and Patience are Keys to Berkeley Heights' Resident's Teaching Success

Karen Deland first taught at The Matheny School in 1979, and she remembers one of the non-verbal students using an autocom, a monotone oral speech device. 

“Matheny was a forerunner in technology then,” she says, and “Matheny is still doing it.  It is still top-of-the line technology-wise for the students, and everybody’s treatment is different and individualized.” 

Deland, a resident of Berkeley Heights, left Matheny in 1980 to teach in the Franklin Township Public School District in Quakertown, NJ.  After earning a law degree and raising a family, she returned to Matheny in 2009 and last year was named the school’s Educator of the Year.
 
In her classes she uses a Smart Board, which helps some of her students with low vision follow along “because it’s so large and bright, and you can change the background and meet their needs. 

"Without the technology, we would be doing textbook learning, which isn’t really appropriate for our population.” 

The Matheny School is part of the Matheny Medical and Educational Center, a special hospital and educational facility here for children and adults with medically complex developmental disabilities.
 
After spending time as a teacher in both public and private schools and practicing law, Deland returned to Matheny because she missed the “special students”. Today’s Matheny students are much more medically complex than the students she taught 30 years ago, but the keys to success, she says, are flexibility and patience. 

“You have to be flexible in all aspects – in scheduling, in progress, in communication.  You just kind of have to roll with it.  Nothing is set in stone.  You may be working on phonetics, and a student will blurt out something that you did yesterday.  That is great gratification. We were working on compound words,” she continues, “and then the next day we were doing something else, and one of the students said, ‘bedroom’.  Wow!  She remembered it.”
 
One of Deland’s students is quasi-verbal; another says a few words; and the other four are non-verbal. 

“Adapting to their different modes of communication is challenging,” Deland admits.  “This morning we had a great big Scrabble board up there, and all the students were playing.  We played Scrabble using phonetics and vocabulary words, and they can do it.  If you take the time and break things down into teeny, tiny task analysis steps, they can communicate.  You just have to be patient and flexible.”
 
Having spent a lot of time educating her students about the impact the Americans with Disabilities Act has had on their lives, Deland also feels very strongly about helping her students be part of the community and part of society. 

“If we cannot provide our population with the ability to be out in public, we have done a disservice to them.” 

Her class recently played miniature golf at Hyatt Hills, a handicapped accessible course in Clark, NJ.  “I can put a student on a bus and take her to Shop Rite or take her to a golf course.  I can’t think of any day that goes by that somebody doesn’t warm my heart.”
 
Deland received her BS degree in elementary education and special education from Vanderbilt University’s College of Education and Human Development and her JD from the Seton Hall University Law School.

Her students are all teenagers, and she has two teenagers at home, who are the same age.  “It’s very heartwarming and enlightening,” she says, “to see that my own kids can walk in here and feel at home.”