About Us

The Cooke Center was founded in 1987 by a small group of parents seeking high quality, inclusive schooling for their children with special needs. Then, as now, the options offered by schools were limited to highly restrictive, self-contained sites with minimal interaction with students from the general school population. Inclusion was then referred to as mainstreaming and it was non-existent in the New York City public or private schools. At the present time, although inclusion programs are more widely available, the children we serve are typically restricted from such programs or offered programs that do not appropriately meet their needs.

The Cooke Center was founded to open the doors of opportunity for children with special needs.

Now in its 20^th year, the Cooke Center has grown from one classroom serving seven children to an organization that in the 2005-2006 academic year will provide direct or indirect services to thousands of children in more than 50 partner schools, pre-K sites and childcare centers.

This year, Cooke will:

• Partner with more than 50 schools, Head Start centers and child care centers.
• Screen more than 1,500 students to identify developmental and language delays.
• Improve preschool learning for more than 600 children through Collaboration for Inclusion.
• Provide individualized instruction to more than 400 students.
• Provide ongoing support and advocacy services to the families of these students.
• Coordinate dozens of internships, community service, and paid employment opportunities to middle and high school students through area employers.
• Offer sustained teacher training to 150 faculty from our partner schools.
• Offer targeted training to hundreds of other teachers, child care workers and professionals. This will, in turn impact classroom learning for thousands of students city-wide and beyond.

Our Partner Schools:

With the exception of one of our high school sites, the Cooke Center does not have the traditional bricks and mortar obligations of the typical school. Instead, its students, instructors, resource specialists and staff are dispersed among more than 50 private and parochial partner school sites (preschool through high school) in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. By going into schools and creating teams of trained educators, administrators and parents, Cooke is able to impact many more children than we would be able to reach through the provision of direct services alone. We develop a core group of practitioners who can use Cooke approaches to measure progress and change the learning culture school-wide.

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