By Cynthia Marshall Schuman

Children’s Health Council aids schools, families

The Children’s Health Council is an airy, new building set well back from the constant commotion of construction on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. A summer visitor to this quiet blue-and-green sanctuary might never guess that come September, it becomes a place of last resort for the most difficult of difficult children: young people who are caught in a web of emotional, cognitive, learning and sometimes physical disorders.

The institution was started in the 1950s by pediatrician Esther B. Clark. Clark, believed to have been Palo Alto’s first pediatrician, observed the strain on families with children struck by polio. “After the basic physical treatment was handled, (the families) needed emotional assistance beyond what could be done in the pediatrician’s office or the hospital,” said Susan Kavet, the council’s manager for corporate and foundation relations.

So the Children’s Health Council was born. And as the community’s needs have changed, so has the organization. Instead of polio, the council now sees children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, anxiety, depression and other disorders. Many of these children have not been successful in their own schools’ special needs programs. They are children whom the public schools can no longer accommodate because of the number and complexity of their problems.

“A child that you might think of moving to a private school like Children’s Health is a child who has an emotional disturbance compounding a learning disability,” said Cathi Serpa, the director of special education local plan area II, which includes Los Altos.

The organization assists schools in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties with this type of child, offering a school, a clinic and an outreach program.

The nine classrooms in the Esther B. Clark School each have up to 10 children. For many of them, this is the only alternative to a residential facility. Each class is staffed by four professionals - a teacher, a teacher’s aide, a therapist and a behavior management specialist.

The clinic that adjoins the school is the largest of the Children’s Health Council’s three parts. In addition to the school’s professional staff, the clinic employs child psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, speech and language specialists and occupational therapists.

Each professional brings a unique expertise, which is why the council tends to get referrals of more complicated cases, Dr. Leon Wanerman said. Wanerman has been involved in children’s mental health for more than 40 years and is completing his second year as the council’s clinical director.

“I’ve really rarely seen an organization like this. On any particular case, we can pull any of these specialists together for either a very complex evaluation or for a series of treatments,” he said.

Evaluations are a big part of the council’s function in the community. Wanerman estimates that over the last school year, his staff worked with around 1,000 families and almost all of them included at least an evaluation.

“Most of the time, when we get a referral, the question is to do an evaluation or to do a re-evaluation and to come up with a plan of remediation which we may implement or which may be referred back out to community specialists,” he said.

The organization also hosts a number of professional education courses and collaborative programs. It has implemented the Behavior Specialist Outreach Program (BSOP), which sends some of the council’s behavior specialists into the schools, supplying the latter with resources that they would not otherwise have.

“The BSOP is really an excellent program; they’re in the forefront there,” Serpa said.

Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital has forged two alliances with the council. The first helps medically fragile children reintegrate into their schools after surviving cancer, organ transplants and other severe medical situations.

In the second program, Children’s Health Council staff psychologists go to the clinic for babies who have been in the neonatal intensive care nursery. There, they evaluate the babies for cognitive deficits or other psychological issues. “If you can evaluate them early enough, you can begin to plan what those babies are going to need in the future,” Wanerman said.