California’s disabled students can get help at their neighborhood schools, a different campus in the district or at a county-run school.
And when things are really challenging, there’s Port View Preparatory.
The prep school and others like it offer education services to special needs students with profound challenges that districts and counties are unable to provide.
“We’re kind of that next step, beyond county,” said founder Melaura Tomaino.
Almost all of Port View’s students have serious communication deficits, she said.
“A lot of our students are non-verbal,” Tomaino said. “Out of that lack of communication results a variety of behavioral challenges — including aggression, self-injury behavior, property destruction — that we also have to tackle.”
And unlike other schools of this sort, Port View doesn’t physically restrain its students or lock them in isolation “time out” rooms. It uses positive reinforcement to change behaviors over time. Along the way, that’s led to teachers’ clothes being torn and, in at least one case, an aide’s nose being broken.
“You have to be honest with yourself: Can you do this? Because lives are on the line,” said founder Edward Miguel. “In this field, it’s for better or for worse. There’s no in between.”
The pair opened their Yorba Linda campus in 2014, and their Ontario campus May 1, 2017. Between the two campuses, Port View contracts with 30 school districts in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, teaching 110 students.
“What you see with a lot of these programs, whether it’s a county program or another non-public school, is they have a type or style that they have: ‘This is our program, everybody does the same program, and we should be able to kick them out with some extra skills,'” Miguel said. “We don’t do that.”
The school has the same sorts of expectations that other schools have of their students, which isn’t always the case with special education students, according to Tomaino. Port View students have proms at hotels and have their own student government (for which elections are currently underway).
After studying at Port View, some students go back to their home districts. Others stay with the school longer and look toward other ambitions, including jobs or college.
Miguel first worked with one student since the boy was 8, and attending a different facility. The boy’s stereotypy — repeated physical movements, in his case, repeated hand-waving — would sometimes escalate into physical aggression, including hitting, scratching and pulling other people’s clothes.
When the boy was 19, and one of Port View’s early students, strategies that had worked with him when he was at 8 no longer worked.
“What would often happen during escalation (of behavior) was that he’d make a lot of repetitive statements, things that he wants or things that he was thinking about,” Miguel said. “They may not be things that we could give him at that time, but they were making him upset: He wanted to graduate, he wanted a job.”
These escalations would sometimes go for two hours, during which staff would have to bob and weave during biting, hitting, scratching and spitting. But over time, the boy — who for the first time wasn’t getting restrained as a result of this behavior — was getting his verbal cues responded to, and began to shift toward expressing himself verbally.
And after a field trip to the Orange County DiscoveryCube, the boy repeatedly told Port View staff he wanted to work at the museum.
“In the back of our minds, we were thinking, ‘What if he has a behavior in that type of a setting?’ But you can’t not try. And we can’t go against what we have been telling the students all along, which is that they have to keep on trying,” Miguel said.
The school arranged for the boy to interview to become a volunteer.
“The kid just became a natural-born marketer,” Miguel said. “‘Why do you want to work here?’ ‘Because this is the best place ever.'”
The boy was accepted on the spot. And later, he decided he wanted to get a job and earn his own money — and wanted to do it at Port View. Today, he works at the Yorba Linda campus.
“The child that hits himself 1,000 times a day is not going to stop in one day,” Miguel said. “It might decrease one hit a day for the next 999 days, but it’s still one hit less.”
Both Tomaino and Miguel has their doctorates, but they believe this specialty is more challenging than the ones tackled by most of their peers.
“I was pre-med at UCLA, was going to be a pediatrician,” Tomaino said.
She took an elective in abnormal psychology while she was there. The day her professor brought in students with autism whose lives had been dramatically changed by applied behavioral analysis, she changed her major to psychology.
“If I can get a kid to go to a restaurant for their uncle’s birthday, when previously, they haven’t left their house, that is socially significant change,” Tomiano said. “I felt like I can really make a difference in somebody else’s life.”
For Miguel, the inspiration started earlier. When he was three, he contracted spinal meningitis, was briefly unable to walk and lost his hearing. (Today, he still wears hearing aids.)
“People told me that I couldn’t get this student to walk independently, or they couldn’t get this student to talk, then I’d say, ‘OK, then that’s the next benchmark,'” Miguel said. “If I could remember the first person who told me I couldn’t do something, I’d probably need to thank them, because I think that’s when my stubborn characteristic kicked into high gear.”
