ART IN THE PALISADES

March, 2000 -- Susan Phibbs Breznay will be the featured artist at the Palisades Post Office for the month of March.
Her artwork combines photography, fiber arts, and drawing and painting. She also works in each medium separately.
She has taught photography and fiber arts at Stone Ridge School and general children’s art classes at the Fillmore Arts Center. She studied photography with Jerry Lake and John Paradiso, fiber arts at Arrowmont and drawing with Hugh Phibbs.
Susan's work mostly emerges from the multiple image approach. People, color and the natural world are the subjects to which she is drawn.
Today Susan lives in the Palisades, but she spent her childhood near Lake Michigan until age nine when she lost that verdant landscape in the family’s move to Casper, Wyoming.
Eventually the vigor and sense of possibility inherent in the Rocky Mountain West worked its way into her imagination. She now misses the “thrilling desolation” of the high plains and finds they show up in subtle ways in her artwork.
—Sheila Rotner

If you’re at Starland Cafe on MacArthur Blvd., check out Palisades artist Fred Pelzman’s paintings (on loan but for sale) of Fletcher’s Boathouse and the Old One Room Schoolhouse on MacArthur.

The River School: New Kids on the Block

March, 2000 -- The River School. You might have noticed the sign on MacArthur Boulevard across from the library. Must have something to do with canoeing or the ecology of the Potomac, right?
Not at all.
The River School, which welcomed its first students in January, is an independent, not-for-profit day school for children with and without hearing loss.
Executive Director Nancy Mellon points out that the school offers “oral education for deaf children.”
In fact, Mellon notes that this is the only school in the country to integrate children with hearing loss in regular classes from Day One.
The hearing-impaired students, who would at most account for 20 percent of any class, have all had cochlear implants. These recently developed devices send an electronic impulse to the auditory nerve, which helps children who are born deaf to hear and to develop language skills. This means they can be integrated into the regular school stream.
(This is one reason they called it the River School; the other is the school’s proximity to the Potomac).
Many of the hearing-impaired students will be referrals from The Listening Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Mellon is the Clinical Coordinator there, and a few years ago her son was the first two-year-old to receive a cochlear implant at the Center. Now Hopkins does about 30-40 implants on children a year.
In conjunction with Hopkins, the River School plans to do clinical research on language development with all the children taking classes there. For the moment, as the school just got going mid-year, there are only 13 students (3 of whom have cochlear implants).
A parent-infant program is held two mornings a week, and a half-day toddlers program every weekday.
By this fall, Mellon expects 50-60 students in preschool through first grade.
The school plans to go through second grade by September 2001 and through third grade a year later.
Tuition is in the mid-range for independent schools, and financial aid is available.
Parents with “typically developing” children (without hearing loss, that is) are attracted to the River School because of the small class size: 12 students per class will be the maximum. And each class will have two teachers with Masters degrees—a speech language pathologist and a regular educator—who will give careful attention to the development of spoken language and literacy from the earliest ages.
The new school has taken over the building that used to house St. John’s Community Services—a building originally constructed for Georgetown Day School. There are 10 classrooms, a music room, and an arts & sciences room.
The organizers plan to build a library as well.
One reason the school’s Board of Directors chose the Palisades for their new and innovative venture is the easy access to Maryland and Virginia. Some of the students already commute from Fairfax County and Alexandria, and next term students from Baltimore and Howard County are expected.
This term the River School has one intern from the Lab School, which is another advantage of being in the Palisades, along with an intern from George Mason’s Teacher Education Program.
The River School, 4880 MacArthur Boulevard, N.W., phone 337-3554
—Linda Starke