PNW BOCES Brings the Normalcy of a School Day to Children’s Rehabilitation Center

Nestled in the woods in the Teatown section of Ossining, at the top of a winding, hilly driveway, is a magical place called the Sunshine Children’s Home and Rehab Center. Here, in a beautifully homey, completed renovated space with stained glass ceilings, babbling fountains and rooms that any child would be proud to call their own live 54 medically fragile children.

The children receive round-the-clock care from doctors, nurses and support staff who treat them as family. Now, thanks to a partnership with Putnam/Northern Westchester BOCES, the Sunshine Home is able to also offer its school age residents the chance to do something most children do every day: go to school.

Over the past year, PNW BOCES has partnered with Sunshine to offer its school-age residents a full-day school experience. Located in several bright and cheerful classrooms a few steps away from the children’s residence, BOCES teachers, working with teaching assistants and aides, use a variety of teaching approaches to adapt the curriculum for individual students to help them reach their maximum potential.

Prior to the partnership with BOCES, most of the children had received no more than two hours of tutoring daily because they were too medically fragile to travel to off-site schools.

“Now the kids get up, get dressed, put on their backpacks and go to school,” said Administrator Linda Mosiello.  “BOCES’ educational program has added that normalcy to the children’s day.”

Some children come to Sunshine after an extended hospital stay and need rehabilitative care that will allow them to return home. For other children, whose care is too complicated for their families to provide, Sunshine becomes a new “second” home. The children have a variety of respiratory, neurological, endocrine and orthopedic disorders.

Recently, BOCES Board of Education members and administrative staff visited Sunshine to take a tour of the facility, including a brand-new classroom for the center’s most fragile students. This classroom, which opens onto a large wooden porch overlooking the center’s park-like setting, was added right onto the residence, keeping the medical care these children require nearby.

The view from the porch includes a pond with fountains -- an intentional design consideration. “The children can hear the fountains from the porch” explained Mosiello. “We have found that the sound of water has a very positive therapeutic effect on the children.”

No detail has been overlooked at the completely renovated facility, which, until 2009 operated as St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Center for Children.  Hallways and gathering areas feature colorful murals, stained glass transforms a ceiling into a blue sky with puffy clouds, wallpaper features touchable texture – everything has been designed through the lens of the children the facility serves.

“It is a truly wonderful partnership, said Bob Kelderhouse, Principal of BOCES’ Pines Bridge School.  “The therapists from Sunshine work hand-in-hand with PNW BOCES staff to meet the individual goals for each student, and the children have greatly benefitted from the new sensory-based school program.”