Smoother Sailing For Chelsea School

Headmaster Credited With Restoring Calm After 2005 Protests Over Teacher Hiring

On the day Anthony Messina first arrived at Chelsea School, a campus he would ultimately lead, students and parents were marching in the streets.

That was two years ago, and the Silver Spring school was in turmoil. Parents and students at Chelsea, a private school that serves students with learning disabilities from across the region, were in an uproar because its leaders had asked all teachers to reapply for their jobs. Much of the campus community was feuding with an interim headmaster who had canceled various senior events and squabbled with students over graduation plans.

By all accounts, Chelsea School is now a far happier place. Messina, his faculty, trustees and student leaders say the school is back on track, although a few bad memories remain.

"I thought I was going to fix this in six weeks," Messina said, reflecting on his tenure. "And it's been two years to get [the school] in safe harbor."

Founded in 1976 by two parents of dyslexic children, Chelsea School serves students with strong academic aptitude who are identified as learning-disabled for difficulty processing language. Most students are referred, and their tuition paid, by public school systems that cannot provide an appropriate classroom setting. The school serves about 80 students in the middle and high school grades; the vast majority of graduates go on to college.

The school's governing board and interim headmaster sparked a protest in spring 2005 when all faculty members were put through a competitive re-interview process. School leaders said the review was necessary to ensure a high caliber of teaching; parents said the headmaster was seeking revenge against teachers whose negative appraisals had factored into a decision not to hire him permanently.

The former headmaster could not be located to comment.

Messina took over that summer and began making allies. He held round-table meetings with parents, attended every Parent Teacher Organization gathering and stayed late three days a week to talk one-on-one with working parents. He formed a leadership group of students who felt disenfranchised, including some of those who had protested.

The father of a learning-disabled child, Messina said it didn't take him long to deduce what was wrong with the school: "Students didn't have a voice, and they didn't have a choice," he said.

He also parted ways with a few parents he felt were "just flat-out not happy with the school," including Dega Schembri, the former PTO chairwoman, who had played a lead role in publicizing the school's problems.

"He didn't want to hear anything bad about the school," said Schembri, whose son was asked to leave in 2006. She said it was an act of retaliation. He is now at Commonwealth Academy in Alexandria, a private school for learning-disabled students.

Chelsea students aren't universal in their praise of Messina -- his proposal to have school uniforms is a sore point -- but most believe that the campus is thriving under his leadership.

"I think we can all agree that communication between parents, staff and students is vastly improved," said Ben Turek, 18, a senior.

The school features small classes and an emphasis on reading. Students tend to arrive with large deficits in reading ability as a result of inadequate help in a regular public school. Most quickly catch up.

In a 10th-grade classroom on a recent morning, students fixed fragmented and run-on sentences. Students in a ninth-grade classroom next door discussed "A Raisin in the Sun." In another class, two seniors studied physics. All students spend 45 minutes daily in a reading tutorial, grouped not by grade but by reading level. The program of study is influenced by the concept of "learning difference," the idea that an inability to process language can create a disparity between intellectual ability and performance.

"If we were in a regular school, we would be the learning-disabled kids," Turek said. "Here, we're the 'learning difference' kids."