By Christiane Connors
The River School in Washington, DC and, subsequently, the Potomac River Clinic and National Center for Hearing Innovation, were born out of the shared vision to ensure all children with hearing loss have the best start imaginable. The first and only progressive, independent school of its kind, The River School provides children with hearing loss and their hearing peers an inclusive learning environment with a heightened focus on language, literacy and social development delivered by highly educated teachers and speech therapists. Working in conjunction with clinical services that lead the field of pediatric auditory, speech and language development, The River School serves a higher purpose and attracts families and professionals who embrace the mission.
Nancy Mellon founded The River School twenty-four years ago. Her purpose was to address a challenge no one in the field had yet had to solve: how can schools best respond to new technologies like cochlear implants that make learning more accessible for children with hearing loss? The school and all the services and programs that have emanated from it have created pathways where none existed before for hundreds of families with children with hearing loss. The educational model also provided an ideal environment for young children with normal hearing to acquire language and literacy skills.
Unintentional at the outset, River School's model of progressive education grew out of the same concepts undergirding Universal Design:
Universal Design (UD) is the design and composition of an environment so that it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size or ability. An environment (or any building, product, or service in that environment) should be designed to meet the needs of all people who wish to use it. This is not a special requirement for the benefit of only a minority of the population; rather, it is a fundamental condition of good design. If an environment is accessible, usable, convenient and a pleasure to use, everyone benefits. By considering the diverse needs and abilities of all throughout the design process, universal design creates digital and built environments, services and systems that meet peoples' needs. Simply put, universal design is good and just design. (Center for Excellence in Universal Design, 2024)
Advancements in Pediatric Hearing Technology
The idea of River’s inclusion model was seeded when Nancy’s fourth child, Will, was born with profound deafness. In 1990, two years before Will was born, the FDA had approved cochlear implants (CIs) for children, a surgical implant that directly stimulates the auditory nerve to send signals to the brain which recognizes and processes these signals as sound. At the time, few educational alternatives existed for children identified with profound hearing loss beyond schools for the deaf with ASL as the primary mode of communication. With more than 90 percent of children with hearing loss born to hearing parents,1 cochlear implants along with other advancements in hearing aid technologies, have offered these parents a possibility that had not existed previously. For the first time their children might acquire language through the same modality as them, spoken language.
A Model Where All Children Can Thrive
When Will received his first cochlear implant at the age of two, he was one of the first children in the United States to do so. In the vanguard of CI pediatric recipients, Nancy had to create her own blueprint for a learning environment where Will would thrive. She enrolled him in a small preschool where for four years he flourished alongside hearing children. Working with the school’s educational team, she hired a speech language pathologist (SLP) who provided push-in support for Will and his classmates. “Will was confident and communicative. He sang, loved books, and talked non stop. I wanted to give other children—really, every child!—born with deafness, a dynamic classroom experience like Will’s, plus the extra support they need, all in one place.” Will was thriving, shattering previously held notions of how a deaf child might engage, learn, play and collaborate with hearing peers. By the age of five, Will’s language comprehension and production were age appropriate. Additionally, his peers with normal hearing had benefited from the heightened focus on language, speech production and literacy.
Shortly after Will received his cochlear implant, Nancy joined the recently launched Cochlear Implant Center at Johns Hopkins University. As the Clinical Coordinator, she secured grants, expanded the rehabilitation program, conducted and published research on early communication, language development and cognitive development of children with CIs. At the same time, she completed a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins in Developmental Psychology. Her master's thesis on language acquisition would turn into a chapter in the seminal textbook, Cochlear Implants: Principles and Practices (2000). As the personal and professional realms became more enmeshed, the idea of The River School also came more into focus.
While Will transitioned into a mainstream program and continued to receive targeted, individualized support outside of school, Nancy’s attention shifted. Having navigated the confusing and fraught landscape of medical interventions, communication approaches and deciding appropriate interventions with her own child, she had become a resource for other parents of children recently identified with hearing loss. As someone predisposed to asking Why not, Nancy was no stranger to wayfinding to meet her children’s needs. By the time she became a mother of a child with hearing loss, she had already started two other schools, the Georgetown Co-Operative Nursery and the Georgetown Nursery School. With both schools, Nancy had been inspired by progressive models of early childhood education, hiring teachers from Bank Street College of Education to ground the schools in progressive approaches. Nonetheless, River School was different.
“It was an odyssey to start River” Nancy reflected, “with the craziest founding story.” After shopping around her idea of a school with inclusive classrooms for children with hearing loss, she received a foundation grant for $3.5 million and an additional multi-year grant for operations. Shortly after purchasing and renovating the school’s present building, the foundation’s board got cold feet. No longer did this idea seem innovative but instead too radical to invest in and subsequently sued Nancy weeks before opening its doors. “Founding The River School was not without hardship, but we never changed our ‘go big or go home’ mentality.” When it first opened its doors in January 2000, ten children were enrolled. The start of its second year saw 95 students enrolled. By its third year, 145 students attended. Today, 248 students call The River School home with approximately 15% having hearing loss.
Proof is in the Pudding
There are many ways to measure success at a school, perhaps none better than the children themselves. Last spring, River alum Lilou Culhane returned to River’s campus for her high school Senior Project. Having been at River for seven years—from its infant program to grade 3—she sought to understand, What makes River such a unique educational program? Why were her preschool to grade 3 schooling years so essential and precious to her? How were all children impacted from the connections and bonds formed between students with and without hearing loss? In two weeks, she produced a powerful short film capturing how the school’s model drives its purpose and how its purpose attracts the best of the best to its community.
Additionally, this school year, River has welcomed its first alumni as faculty, Will Powell. A triplet, Will and his two siblings enrolled at River in September, 2000 at 18 months old. Mr. Jones, Ms. Rose and other teachers who are now his colleagues can recall rocking him to sleep, teaching him to read, showing him how to make a hook shot. “I returned because of the people,” Will shared, and wanting to be a part of a place that helped launch him and still holds real personal significance.
Recently, a parent whose child graduated from River last year shared her newfound appreciation for its model. “Because we had only been at River, we didn’t have anything to compare it to. Now, I realize how its model makes children empathetic and attuned to others' needs by living it. I don’t think any social emotional curriculum could ever teach the positive, upstanding character traits more effectively than experiencing River’s model.” My conversation with this parent whose child has typical hearing brought to mind John Dewey’s ideas on what end and purpose should schools serve. “As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end” (Democracy and Education, 2012). The River School, driven by its mission and purpose, is making for a better future society through the children it serves, the families whose lives have been transformed and a remarkably innovative and dedicated multidisciplinary team.
When so many people from around the city, country and world can all start a story with, “And then we found The River School…,” it is clear that something important is happening at this unique progressive school. When families from diverse racial, ethnic, national and socioeconomic backgrounds whose paths might have never crossed but nonetheless delineate life as before and after River, there is something significant to name. The River School is a model of how we must use innovation and science to push the ways in which a progressive philosophy of education can successfully be translated into practice in the 21st Century.
Works Cited:
Center for Excellence in Universal Design (2024, January 18). About Universal Design. Center for Excellence in Universal Design. https://universaldesign.ie/about-universal-design
Dewey, J. (2011). Democracy and education. Simon & Brown.
Mitchell, R. E., & Karchmer, M. A. (2004). Chasing the Mythical Ten Percent: Parental Hearing Status of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students in the United States. Sign Language Studies, 4, 138-168.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christiane Connors is the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at The River School in Washington, DC, which serves children ages 18 months through 5th grade through a unique co-teaching model that pairs a master’s level educator with a speech-language pathologist in each classroom. This model ensures all learners thrive in an environment dedicated to experiential and collaborative learning through thematic inquiry-based curriculum. She is also a parent of a child with cochlear implants.
