A letter from a Tilden Alumni parent

Tilden Alumni Families know firsthand about Tilden's success rate. Children who started preschool at Tilden have gone on to success in mainstream classrooms throughout the district and throughout the Bay Area. One parent, Julie Wolters, wrote this letter about her son's experience:

Tilden School was an absolute life changing educational experience for my son. Tilden provided a central location with many services concentrated for my son and many other special needs children. My son was able to attend an autism preschool class, mainstream into a speech-delay class, mainstream into a Head Start preschool class, receive OT and speech, have integrated playgroups with some typically developing students at Tilden, have art, PE, and music classes with specially trained teachers, use the OT room, which at the time was beautifully equipped, and many other wonderful advantages.

Another precious thing about Tilden was the supportive school-wide culture, where my son and many others found acceptance and felt so much at home, where everyone in the school understood what their needs were and how to best communicate with them. My son was the star of a number of Tilden concerts and was celebrated for his language skills there, when he was less developed than his peers and didn’t receive that kind of recognition elsewhere.

My son has since successfully joined the mainstream in education, attending 1st grade in Danville, and I give Tilden School, with the excellent teachers and staff who worked with my son, full credit for this accomplishment.

I tell many people in the San Ramon school district about the fine, creative work that is being done for special needs children at Tilden School in Oakland. I think Tilden is a model for the rest of the nation in how to best educate young children with special needs. In fact, often times I don’t need to further explain about Tilden, because it has such a good reputation among many service providers, practitioners, and special ed teachers.

It is a complete shame and such a waste to trim Tilden out of the Oakland school district. Furthermore, I doubt OUSD will save money in the long run. I would have been perfectly willing to go to due process and demand a private school education for my son, at OUSD’s expense, if Tilden had not been such a fantastic experience for us. I urge you to reconsider this plan and, instead, why not send some of the children from the under-enrolled, poorly maintained, low-API schools, to Tilden? Why mess with one of the jewels of the OUSD system?

Sincerely,
Julie Wolters