NEWS AND NOTES

COMMUNITY SCHOOL:
THE LEGACY OF DR. BEATRICE LIEBEN

Through a lifetime of achievement and in a variety of ways, Dr. Beatrice Lieben has had a phenomenal impact on special education in New Jersey and on the lives of thousands of children. No impact has been more profound though than Dr. Lieben’s lasting legacy, The Community School.

In 1968, Dr. Bea Lieben defined a need and made it a reality. As a clinical child psychologist who specialized in the diagnosis and treatment of children with learning problems, Dr. Lieben recognized that many intelligent children with learning problems were frequently neglected by educators because of the subtle, often hidden, nature of their difficulties. It had been easy to relate school failures to emotional or attitudinal factors which required treatment outside the framework of the school, but prior to Dr. Lieben, few professionals had been able or willing to address the needs of this population in a school setting. Bea Lieben started what is the present Community School in order to do just that.

At the time, there were programs for the slow learner, for children who were then labeled “retarded,” and for the intellectually gifted, but almost none in New Jersey, for children who failed to learn despite good intelligence and good motivation. Dr. Lieben designed Community School to demonstrate how a strong academic program could successfully meet the remedial and developmental needs of the learning disabled child and to prove that many of the emotional and behavioral problems that so often accompany the academic delays could be resolved within a school’s therapeutic milieu. This mission statement, at the center of Bea’s design for an effective school, remains the primary goal at Community School.

Beginning with a handful of students and teachers. Dr. Lieben nurtured her vision of a school which would both remediate and stimulate. Community School became a place where good, strong teaching, offered within a supportive framework of trust, could work. Under Dr. Lieben’s guidance, the original Community School of Tenafly moved to larger quarters in Englewood within a year or so. In Englewood, Dr. Lieben’s small school continued to grow quickly so that within a decade it numbered over one hundred students and forty staff. As it became clear that adolescents past grade eight also were in need of a school like Community School, Dr. Lieben gathered her staff and in 1980, under her guidance, a high school was formed, locating initially in Demarest. By 1985 the Community School was located on two growing campuses educating some 200 students with a supportive staff of more than eighty- five. Today, with the Lower School and the High School both in Teaneck, Community School ranks as one of the largest of the state’s 140 private school systems for students with special needs, educating over 300 students with a staff of over 140!!

The relatively rapid growth of the Community School was fueled by the excellence which Bea Lieben insisted accompany the growth. During the early years, faced with the challenge of educating not only Community School’s children but also of educating a public largely unaware of what learning disabilities meant, Dr. Lieben became a pioneer in the field. She was innovative in identifying the importance of good educational intervention for learning disabled children, in recognizing the importance of challenging the learning disabled child with high intellectual content, in diagnosing and treating reading disorders, and in developing educational strategies for use in the classroom.

Dr. Lieben pioneered as well in identifying the maturational changes in the learning disabled child, in interpreting and treating the behavioral problems associated with learning disabilities, in recognizing the connection between learning disabilities and differing aspects of brain functioning and in relating behavior to underlying dysfunctions.

As the school developed, Dr. Lieben also led the way in putting theory into practice. She was in the forefront in helping to develop proper professional attitudes toward learning disabled children, in establishing teacher training in the field of learning disabilities, in establishing programs for parents, and in stressing the importance of parent-teacher interaction for those working with the learning disabled child.

During the early years, as her pioneering ideas were applied to Community School, Dr. Lieben wore many hats: administrator, curriculum specialist, psychologist, bookkeeper and teacher. She offered long hours at the office, held countless meetings with parents, students, teachers, and siblings, always doing whatever was needed to get the job done. She spent days interviewing teachers to choose the right ones for her students and months training teachers, designing in-service workshops, lecturing, writing papers and delivering seminars, all to assure that an understanding, dedicated staff would be available and knowledgeable. She was not only a pioneering psychologist and educator, but when the need called for it, she willingly became a “chef,” making peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for a hungry student, a “nurse” bandaging the scraped knee of a child who slipped at recess, and always a “friend,” offering her unique smile, her hug, her kind hello, and regularly extending her hand to those who needed it.

Professionally, nobody was more prepared to begin an enterprise like Community School than Dr. Lieben. A brief look at her credentials adds to the understanding of how instrumental and effective her thirty-five years in educating the learning disabled child have been.

A graduate of New York University and the College of New York, Dr. Lieben did graduate research at Teachers College of Columbia University and at the Alfred Adler Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. In addition to her extensive private practice in diagnosing and treating children with learning problems, she has served as clinical child psychologist, lecturer and supervisor of the Education Clinic of the College of the City of New York; as the Director of the Alfred Adler Institute in New York; as Associate Director of the Alfred Adler Mental Hygiene Clinic in New York and as Director of Child and Youth Services of the Alfred Adler Mental Hygiene Clinic in New York.

Dr. Lieben has published numerous articles in education and psychology journals including Education, Psychology Today and The Journal of Individual Psychology and she was the author of the audio-tape series for the Behavioral Science Tape Library on “Children with Learning Disabilities.” She remains an active member of several divisions of the American Psychological Association and the Association of Children with Learning Disabilities. She has delivered hundreds of lectures and seminars to parents and professionals, including lectures before the Orton Society, the New Jersey Association of Learning Consultants, and at Fairleigh Dickinson and Harvard Universities.

Her credentials, obviously superb, go on and on. They explain well how for thrity-five years she has been able to provide her constant legacy of excellence.

The single common denominator which Community School graduates, students and teachers share is the respect they have of Dr. Lieben and the credit they give her for their accomplishments. She is warm, loving, intelligent and purposeful. Students who have gone on to colleges, to the world of work, or to raise families, often return to visit Community School. They note regularly how they would not have accomplished what they have, had it not been for Dr. Lieben. Teachers reminisce often on how much “Bea” taught them and how well she continues to teach them. Professionals, child study teams, educators from public school districts and other private schools visit our school and recall how innovative, dynamic and special Dr. Lieben has always been.

They too remain touched by Dr. Lieben and her legacy which is The Community School.