Groundbreaking on a site in Providence is expected in the spring.

01:00 AM EST on Friday, February 25, 2005

BY RICHARD C. DUJARDIN
Journal Staff Writer

EAST PROVIDENCE -- Senators Jack Reed and Lincoln D. Chafee will visit Meeting Street School today to announce $650,000 in federal money for a 7-acre campus off Route 95 at Thurbers Avenue and Eddy Street in Providence.

The money is the largest single contribution toward the $13-million to $15-million project, school president John Kelly said.

The federal money will go toward recreation programs and facilities, including a pool for therapy.

Since opening in a former public school building on the East Side of Providence in 1946, Meeting Street has become recognized nationally as an pioneer and a leader in offering integrated educationand therapy to children who have disabilities and developmental delays.

For the past 10 years, the school has educated children with no obvious disabilities side by side with those who are disabled or delayed.

The school, located at 667 Waterman Ave., has used that approach in its Bright Futures Early Learning Center, for children from infancy to kindergarten. The school's goal for the new campus is to expand that through the eighth grade, Kelly said.

"Our plan is move to another level, to do something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the country," he said.

"Sure, you can find bits and pieces in other places. But what you don't find anywhere else is a program of inclusive education running from six weeks to eighth grade."

School officials are giving the new campus the working name of National Center for Excellence. Their goal is to have an inclusive elementary, middle and high schoolfor disabled and nondisabled students, though emphasis on inclusivity might not include high school students for at least a few years.

Meeting Street serves approximately 1,700 children a year with teams that visit homes, schools and daycare centers off campus. It has about 150 students on campus, including 85 disabled and nondisabled students in the Bright Futures center and 70 disabled students at the main school.

Sheila Murphy, a school spokeswoman, said many parents of nondisabled students who want their children to have an inclusive education would be eager to send them to Meeting Street if an elementary or middle school program were available.

Kelly said that as the program expands, enrollment at Meeting Street could double or triple, which is why the school believes it is time to build.

Groundbreaking will take place in late April or May.

Officials have not determined what they will do with the property on Waterman Avenue, just a little less than 7 acres, when the new campus opens, but acknowledged that developers are interested in buying the land.

As for the Providence campus, Kelly said: "We expect to become a resource center. Educators will be able to come here to study, and then take things back that they can replicate in their own school systems."

He said it will work because "the curriculum we have put in place is a model that works for all kids, and we will demonstrate that model."

Until the mid-1940s, school officials say, disabled children often did not have the chance to attend school.

In 1946, Dr. Eric Denhoff, a pediatric neurologist, and Margaret "Poggy" Langdon Kelly, an educator, convinced Providence school authorities to let them use an old school on Meeting Street as an experimental school for children with disabilities.

The building proved to be a challenge in itself, because it had stairs. The school moved to the grounds of Butler Hospital in the 1960s, and to East Providence in the 1970s.

School officials have raised about 60 percent of the money needed for the new school. An appeal to the public is expected this summer.

The new campus is expected to open in the fall of 2006.