Two Views of the Fountain Valley Program

Abstract

SAlthough the Community Services Program is basically a part of the regular curriculum offerings at Fountain Valley High School, this is no ordinary high school class. At the same time it epitomizes all of the goals embodied in the true educational experience-skills development, knowledge of self, recognition of individual worth, opportunity for meaningful service, vocational investigation, and a real-life situation. SThe clients in the Sensory Development Program are severely and profoundly retarded in addition to their handicap of blindness or impaired vision. Each requires an ongoing close relationship with another person to aid him in learning to relate to his environment. Under the direction of their supervisory teacher, Gene Flory, the Fountain Valley High School students have assisted program staff in providing this much-needed one-to-one relationship with our clients in a consistent, dedicated, and motivating way. Learning stations have been established by the students that have enabled the clients to more readily achieve their educational objectives, and they have also made it possible to increase, from 20 to more than 90, the number of clients who participate in this training. Our program staff report that as a result of the involvement of the students, the attention span of the clients has greatly increased, they are happier and more at ease in their environment, and they relate better on an individual basis. We look forward to continuing for many years to come this very beneficial and mutually satisfying relationship.S It has been the students, under the direction of compassionate and perceptive instructors and working with a most cooperative and insightful hospital administrative staff, who have seized an opportunity and literally exploded it into a beautiful human experience that has touched significantly the lives of everyone involved. The students have brought a meaning of love and joy to other young people that could never have been written into any curriculum guideline. In turn, they have discovered themselves to be worthwhile, creative, caring people, and thus enhanced their own self-image beyond all expectations. Because they are so caught up in the experience at the hospital, the students have extended their personal involvement with the young people at the hospital literally thousands of hours beyond their regular class-time obligation so that the program has become an integral part of their lives.5