Oak Hill School Announces New Executive Director

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By Marin Scope Staff - Sausalito Marin Scope: March 13, 2008

Marin City's Oak Hill School, a school for children with autism and other learning challenges, recently announced the appointment of Dr. Glenn Motola as executive director. He replaces Karen Kaplan, who led the school for the past five years.

Motola, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, joins Oak Hill from Catholic Charities CYO, San Francisco, where he most recently was director of programs and services, managing a staff of 800, serving more than 40,000 clients annually.

"We're confident Glenn has the skills and experience to take Oak Hill to the next level, including what we can offer our students and the role we can play in the development and testing of innovative curriculum," said Jennifer Fearon, co-chair of Oak Hill's board of directors and a founder of the school. "He brings energy and expertise that will make a tremendous impact on the students and the wider special education community.

I was looking for an opportunity that spoke to my passions both professionally and personally. Oak Hill is that opportunity," said Motola. "The school is poised for its next phase of maturation and development, and I am pleased to be leading the Oak Hill community at this dynamic time.

Oak Hill will also be holding its annual benefit event, "Comedy for Kids With Autism," headlined by Dana Carvey and preceded by a gourmet dinner from renowned local chefs, on Fri., April 25, 5:30 p.m., at the Regency Center, in San Francisco. Proceeds from the evening will benefit Oak Hill, as well as two other organizations serving children with autism, Marin's Ryder Foundation and the ASHA Academy in Bangalore, India.

For more information about Oak Hill or "Comedy for Kids With Autism," call 331-7607 or visit theoakhillschool.org. Contact Marin Scope Staff at scope@marinscope.com

Ride of a Lifetime: Cycling Legend Cruises Through Marin for Charity

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Rick Polito - Article Launched: 10/01/2006 04:58:00 AM PDT

It came in variations of verbiage but the question was always rhetorical.
Joe Amon asked it anyway.

"How many people get to ride with Eddy Merckx?" the San Rafael racer queried, clipped into his titanium racing bike and flying his Zteam colors.

On Friday, the answer was 160.

The cycling deity had rolled into Marin City for an event organized by the Marin-based Zteam masters squad benefiting the Oak Hill School and its program for children with autism and developmental challenges.

The 160 or so riders had each paid $100 to ride on the wheel of the man who stormed the European circuit in the 1960s and 1970s as "the Cannibal," destroying the field in every race on every terrain.

Merckx won the Tour de France five times and the Giro d'Italia three times. He held the hour record and has three world champion jerseys in his collection. Of the 1,582 races he entered in a 13-year career, he won 525.

Few names in sport come attached to the word "greatest." Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, the list is short.

Merckx is on that list.

And we were going to ride with him. I was going to ride with him.

Friday was a good day for vintage steel. And vintage wool jerseys. And even a vintage Citroen sedan with a Tour de France team car placard from 1972 and the authentic audio of a "Tour de France" horn.

But it was a really good day for vintage riders.

I'm nearly two decades short of Merckx's vintage but San Anselmo cycling historian Owen Mulholland remembers the era well. Back then, finding 160 people in Marin who had even heard the name Merckx would have been unthinkable. "It was this little postage stamp-sized sport," Mulholland recalled. "Now Eddy Merckx is here and it's wall to wall."

On Friday, Merckx moved about the Marin City parking lot through a phalanx of digital cameras. "This is idol worship gone crazy," Mulholland observed. "But in a good way."

Michael Williams takes that idol worship seriously.

Williams brought the Citroen. His other car has EMERCKX plates. "We talked about him so much back then my mother thought he was on our cycling team," the Sacramento bike shop owner said, holding his vintage steel Eddy Merckx bicycle by the era-appropriate alloy handlebars.

Nearby, Tom Hardy, a 51-year-old San Francisco cyclist in the equivalent of a period costume with his leather head protection, was elbowing close to his idol. "He's been my hero since I was 13." Ten feet away, Carlos Soto lined up his modern Merckx frame against the bike that the man himself would be riding for a picture. The Benicia 45-year-old was already wearing his Eddy Merckx-autographed bike jersey. "I feel like taking it off right now so I won't sweat it out," he declared.

Merckx smiled through the reverence, signing the autographs, smiling for every posed "Me and Eddy!" photo.

But they came to ride.

Hunter Ziesing, "The Z in Zteam," had only a few announcements. Everybody would have a chance to roll wheel to wheel with the cycling god. But it would be no race. "We want to keep the ride casual, mellow and safe," he announced. This would not be Mont Ventoux in '69 when Merckx required oxygen at the finish line. "Nobody gets dropped."

Ziesing's decree lasted perhaps half a mile.

Merckx may be 61 and most of the worshipers on Friday were upwards of 40, but the two wheels and testosterone equation were clearly in play. By the time the cyclists reached the bike path to Mill Valley, the wheels were spinning at 23 mph. Riders were threading the needle to move up through the pack. Everybody wanted their Eddy moment. The speed notched up.

I was afraid to look at my heart rate monitor and this was the first mile.
As we rolled up Blithedale to approach the Camino Alto climb, the peloton was already shedding riders out the back. The jokes were coming in heavy breaths. Who would go on the attack? Who would make a move on the Cannibal? "I can take him," nodded a rider on a blue Schwinn Paramount, smiling. By the time we'd descended into Larkspur, the pack was strung out across half a mile, riders still jockeying to get on Merckx's wheel. I had to dig deep to catch the lead group.

The main pack at the front was already whittled by half, the survivors threading through stopped cars, pacing ahead of the CHP motorcycle patrol. I pulled alongside Merckx as we started up Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael. "Is this crazy enough Eddy?" I asked. "I don't know why we are taking these roads with this traffic," he grumbled.

Cycling's greatest star was sharing the road with soccer moms.
But the pace did not slow. For most of the loop around China Camp, we stayed upwards of 25 mph. Merckx is well into senior discount status and many kilos past his fighting weight, but he was gliding easy.

Spinning up Anderson Drive to Sir Francis Drake to drop back into Larkspur, I found myself at the front. I looked at my heart rate monitor, the beats per minute high enough that I wouldn't want my riding buddies to read about it in the newspaper.

Merckx rolled past me on the right, steady in the saddle.

Back on the Mill Valley bike path, the heroics were over. Tom Hardy recalled an encounter a few weeks earlier on a Marin climb with cyclists debating who would win in a Lance Armstrong/Merckx match-up. In the bike cult, "Lance is the greatest ever" is the glaring sign of the neophyte.

"I told them it'd probably be 50/50," Hardy remarked as we neared the end of the bike path. "But Merckx is 61 years old."

When the remaining peloton swooped into the starting point, Merckx barely rose off the saddle before the autograph hunters had their pens out. We were still breathing heavy. It had been no parade lap. We were amazed at the pace. We were amazed at the man.

But the rhetorical question had to be asked, again.


This time it was Fairfax rider Marvin Zauderer. He was beaming as we all were.

"How many chances do you get to ride with the greatest?

On Friday, the answer was "once." The event was billed as "The Ride of a Lifetime."

It felt like it.

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Dennis Aftergut's name used to appear regularly in these pages. He was what you'd call a player, someone whose phone calls were returned and table reservations accepted.

As San Francisco's chief deputy city attorney under Louise Renne, he argued in front of the California and U.S. Supreme courts. He was the lead attorney in successfully defending the city's groundbreaking domestic-partners ordinance in the late 1990s against United Airlines, paving the way for similar laws across the United States.

Then, in the summer of 2000, Aftergut disappeared.

" I tell people I'm in the fourth year of my two-month leave,'' he joked the other day, sitting in an office of a tiny school called Oak Hill in Marin City.

This is why Aftergut walked away from his career. This place. A converted old house with hardwood floors and pale blue shingles. No, that's not exactly right. He left for something else: The 14-year-old boy in the front room, the lanky kid with glasses studying Christopher Columbus.

Aftergut had watched his son fail year after year in public and then private schools. He couldn't find a place where teachers knew how to uncover the learner beneath Max's disabilities. So Aftergut and three other families with children like Max -- kids with significant developmentally based learning issues such as autism -- decided the only way to find such a place was to create it. They pooled their money and energy, bought this sprawling turn-of-the-century house, renovated it and opened in September 2000 with just their own four children.

" Life is a series of choices,'' Aftergut said by way of explanation. "You have a child, and you'll do anything - anything - to help your child succeed.''

The school now has 14 children, the maximum it can handle until more money is raised for expansion. The tuitions of five students are being paid by public school districts which see Oak Hill as a desperately needed option. Most of these kids had been written off by teachers and doctors as uneducable. But their parents saw something else: the glimmer of the vibrant, loving child beneath the wandering eyes and awkward movements.

Artist Mary Porter saw it in Leah. Doctors had told her early on that her daughter might never speak, that she might never be able to tell the difference between her mother and a table. "I was handed a lot of Kleenex and told to come to grips with my child's disability,'' said Porter, positioning a sprinkler in the school's backyard vegetable garden.

Leah, now 9, dug in the dirt nearby, wearing long purple rubber gloves she keeps on even in the classroom. Porter uprooted from Mendocino last year to move to Marin and enroll Leah at Oak Hill. Leah now not only talks, she also engages in group conversation and is learning how to read facial expressions to distinguish between emotions.

" When I went back to Washington, D.C., to see Leah's specialist,'' Porter said, her voice catching, "he said, 'We've been tapping with a tiny hammer out here by ourselves all these years, and Oak Hill took a sledgehammer and knocked down her walls.' "

Max could barely read when he began at the four-student Oak Hill at age 11. Now, he buries himself in the sports section of the newspaper every morning. The other night, Aftergut found Max's light on late at night and a "Hardy Boys'' book on the floor. He is a different kid, Aftergut began to say, then he suddenly stopped. He couldn't speak for a moment, then apologized for being so emotional.

" Max is now open and curious and able to accept that to learn something new, you have to take a chance that you might fail,'' he said.

It's one thing to watch a corner of society be transformed by what you do in your professional life.

But it doesn't carry the weight of watching one child begin to carry himself with confidence, to begin to emerge from the cocoon of his disabilities and see in himself what you always knew was there.

This is what keeps Aftergut postponing his return to law. He and the rest of the Oak Hill board want to build more classrooms and hire more occupational therapists, more psychologists, more speech therapists and more learning specialists to serve more children.

" This was never just about our kids,'' he said. "You want to make this happen because there are all these families and children in need and no place for them to turn.''