The Guild for Exceptional Children is a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn which offers schooling and other services for children and adults with a disability. It identifies itself as a "provider of direct and indirect services for developmentally delayed or disabled persons, from infancy through old age, and their families."
The title of the agency is somewhat misleading – though it was originally founded by families that needed extra support for their special needs children, it now provides services for all ages, including a growing number of senior citizens who have been receiving services from the agency for decades. Some of the developmentally disabled adults have even advocated for an agency name change to better reflect who they are and create more distance from the idea that they are "child-like". People attending Guild programs may become members of a "self-advocacy" group where they discuss their rights and recommend changes within the agency.
Read more about Guild For Exceptional Children: History
Famous quotes containing the words exceptional and/or children:
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)