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Attention Bloomington dePaul School Alumni and Friends! If you are an alumnus or alumna of Pinnacle School or the Bloomington dePaul School and are not receiving emails or mail from us, that means we don’t have your current address! Please drop us a note or email at info@pinnacleschool.org -- we would like to stay in touch! [to top]Pinnacle School is celebrating its sixth year in our new facility and our 32nd year of service to the community. In 2006, our Board of Trustees developed an innovative strategic plan that will lead us forward. The Bloomington dePaul School became the Pinnacle School in August 2004. Dorothy Soudakoff, one of the school's founders and former Board of Trustees President, dedicated the 2nd Street facility on August 31, 2004. In August 2012, we moved to our current facility on Industrial Park Drive. Our 35,000 square-foot campus allows us to significantly expand our program and curriculum. Dedicated facilities provide students with enhanced learning opportunities in science, art, and technology, and our core -- language arts. Through our innovative program options, and new Dyslexia Resource Center, Pinnacle School serves as an educational resource center for dyslexia throughout the area. [to top]
A Personal
Account of Our History In 1977 my husband and I inherited two pre-adolescent boys. We had been told that the older one, age 12, "had a reading problem," and what that meant, we soon discovered, was that he could not read at all and could not write even his name with consistency. The boy was obviously of above average intelligence, and my husband and I were convinced that with the resources available from MCCSC and Indiana University, we would be able to help him. We were wrong. All attempts by all parties to address his significant reading delay failed. In the spring of 1979, some women came from Indianapolis, where they had a Saturday program affiliated with the DePaul School in Louisville, to talk about dyslexia: what were its characteristics and how it could be remediated. A group of us attending the talk recognized our children in their description. The next fall 14 families rented a school bus to take our children to Indianapolis each week for Saturday School. This went on for two years, and the summers following those two years, our son attended the DePaul School Summer Program in Louisville. After two years of catching the bus at 6:00 every Saturday morning to take our kids to school, we decided to start our own Saturday program in Bloomington—the Bloomington dePaul School. That led later to a summer program, and now, of course, there is the full-time school. Since my sons had graduated from high school by the time the full-time school was established, there was a period when I had little first-hand contact with the Bloomington dePaul School. Now, as president of the Board of Trustees, I am delighted to announce that, in addition to the full-day, full-curriculum school for dyslexic learners, we have established a Community Reading Clinic in honor of Marjorie Brock, one of the early dePaul tutors who continues to work with the program, and that university professors are participating. Yes, we parents started the dePaul School because neither MCCSC teachers, at the time, nor local IU professors could help our children in real life, in real time. The Bloomington dePaul School has since mastered helping such children, and now the IU School of Education is eager to (a) use the de Paul environment to provide unique experiences for their student teachers and (b) provide a knowledge base for research into ways to better serve this population. At the same time, schools within the MCCSC provide venues for this clinic, and thus, public school children benefit from dePaul-like teaching strategies. So the Bloomington dePaul School has come nicely and importantly full swing. [to top] |
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