Building up individuals, with a little help

It was a Facebook post that drew an outpouring of support from the Findlay community to Ms. Donna's Adaptive Learning Center. In early February, Whitney May, administrative assistant at Ms. Donna's, reached out to the Facebook group "Findlay, Ohio: Neighbors Helping Neighbors" requesting help from the community for food donations. "At this time, we don't have any sort of assistance for students who may have families struggling with providing healthy, filling meals," May wrote in the post. "Currently, we have several staff members who are providing food for students with their own income." Ms. Donna's is a small alternative school for students with learning disabilities located on Olive Street in Findlay. The school currently has 25 students ranging in ages from 7-22 years old, elementary to high school. May and her mother, Donna Shick, opened the center seven years ago in a 3-story home. They moved buildings during the pandemic, after realizing their school was growing. But the center is considered a homeschooling program, or a "community school," by Ohio law. They do not qualify to receive any monetary benefits from the state because they aren't a chartered public school. "That's why I ended up on Facebook asking for donations," May said. "I've got kids coming in here with half a cookie for lunch and a mayonnaise sandwich because they ran out of meat because two or three other kids prior to this child had to make their own sandwich. By the time it got to her, there was no meat left." Before the Facebook post, food-related donations came during the holidays, or were purchased out of staff members' own pockets. "I go to buy everything for a Thanksgiving dinner (because) we've done that every single year. It's just gotten too costly for me to carry it on my own," said Shick. But then a lifeline was thrown. "It's overwhelming," said May, teacher and administrative assistant at Ms. Donna's. "We've probably gotten upwards of a thousand dollars worth of food at this point." And the support just keeps coming in. "We've had community members bring in actual meals. We've had people bring in boxes of stuff. We've got bags over there, bottled water over there," May said. Most students' families don't pay out of pocket to send their children to Ms. Donna's. Many students, May explained, receive scholarships to go to the school. "We are providers for the Jon Peterson and autism scholarships for the state of Ohio," May said. "Our students get scholarships to come here and then the state pays the scholarship to us after we bill for services." The Jon Peterson Special Needs scholarship program "provides scholarships to students who are eligible to attend kindergarten through 12th grade and have an Individualized Education Program (IEP) from their district," the Ohio Department of Education website states. An IEP is a document written by school districts that outlines a focused educational plan for individual students. The staff at Ms. Donna's fill out the IEPs for parents and go over educational goals with them during parent-teacher conferences. "We have kids with autism, we have kids with ADHD," said May. "We also have learning disabilities, specific learning disabilities, a lot of our kids have math and reading disabilities, or either or. We have a child that's deaf." The range of disabilities the teachers work with requires a flexible teaching style. "The requirement is that we give them 900 hours of instruction. We try to build our calendar to be 1,100 hours," May said. Ms. Donna's instructs students differently than a public school would, with classes from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. The staff at the center also identify children who may be struggling in a subject, so students are grouped together depending on if they're on track for their grade level or behind. "When we branch out into social studies, science, we try to keep it all one," explained Shick, owner of Ms. Donna's. "But we have to break up math. We have four math groups. We have at least four language arts groups, at least, maybe more." Another large part of education at the center is life skills. Students take cooking classes each week and high schoolers are given budgets to spend at the school store or on special activities like board game parties. High school students meet with Shick each week individually to chat and let her know what they may be excelling in or struggling with. "They get to come and have 35 minutes and just get to talk about whatever's going on — their grades, where they're headed, what they can do to maybe bring their grades up, where they stand," she said. "If they've done something very well, that's a time that I give them a lot of praise about it." A few students have already graduated from Ms. Donna's. The mother and daughter duo are often updated with the progress former students have made outside of school. Shick recounted: "Our first student that graduated ... when she got the key to her apartment, the first person that she called was me. And she's like, I wanted to tell you first before I told anyone else. It just brought me, the whole, full circle," May said. May has a lot of plans to help students after they graduate from the center. She's opened a nonprofit that will help former students transition into adult life. "I want these kids to be able to leave here and have a life like you and me. And transition is where that happens. It's where they get their life skills and all of that stuff." There's currently one former student in the transition program. He works as a janitor and handyman for the center. Shick wants to retire — eventually, she said — and will slowly decrease the time spent at the center. But her daughter says the name will always be "Ms. Donna's." "The biggest thing for me was I wanted to impact one kid. That was my whole goal when I started doing this," said Shick. They didn't expect the overwhelmingly positive reaction from the community after they reached out on social media. "I mean, we don't always get to see the faith in humanity," May said. And focusing on the human, on the individual, is what helps the students grow, the duo says. "The relationship that we have with (the students), it needs to be solid or we're not going to teach them anything. So before we worry about anything else, we worry about the whole kid here," May said. Now they can rest easy, at least for a while, knowing that the community has their back.