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Feeding Time at Oak Hill School

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link to article in Marin Independent Journal at marinij.com

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

link to article in San Francisco Chronicle at SFGate.com

Why one dad got off fast track
He founded school for disabled kids

Joan Ryan Friday, October 17, 2003

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.''

E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.