March 12, 2009
Experimental Education Unit to become research center with planned gift from founding director
It was in 1965 that Norris Haring, professor of special education, founded what was to be the UW’s Experimental Education Unit. And then he directed the school for more than a dozen years.
Now, almost a half-century later, Haring and his family are giving the unit an expanded future as a research center and strengthening its support of graduate education with the promise of an extraordinarily generous gift.
Haring, 85, now a professor emeritus, and his wife, Dorothy, have established an endowment for the school that, upon their death, will provide as much as $4.7 million. The money will fund 15 graduate fellowships each year for students committed to the field of special education, and other assistance to the school’s research and teaching missions.
With the commitment of this gift, the largest in the EEU’s history, the unit is emerging as the Norris and Dorothy Haring Center for Applied Research and Training in Education — or the Haring Center, for short.
“As students pursue a career in the social sciences, advanced studies in special education are often not their first choice. It’s not an area they seek out,” said Norris Haring, who has spent his career developing educational strategies for learning- and behaviorally-disabled students. “I hope to change that with this support, by actually offering assistance to those who will begin studying effective ways of dealing with students with a wide range of disabilities.”
Haring called it “truly a family donation,” and indeed, the Haring family has shown a longtime commitment to education. Dorothy Haring was a teacher for 24 years, often focusing on children with special needs, and was honored for her service by the Bellevue School District when she retired in 1993.
“She was something to watch!” her husband said, remembering with a smile. “Dorothy has an unusual talent in working with large groups of children with disabilities.”
The Harings have two daughters — Kathryn Haring-Lovett, a professor of special education at the University of Oklahoma; and Martha Haring, a clinical psychologist who practices in Edmonds. Their son, Thomas Haring, who was a professor of special education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, died in 1993. Norris Haring retired from the UW in 1996 but still remains interested and active in special education studies.
The EEU, which now serves about 250 students of all abilities from birth to age 7, is known for providing a caring, creative and inclusive educational environment. “The educational practices demonstrated have been shown to make a significance difference in the performance of those students,” Haring said.
Ilene Schwartz, professor and chair of the College of Education’s special education area and director of the EEU, said one of the reasons for the school’s success is its focus on a positive environment. “We work with the idea that (students) are going to be successful,” Schwartz said. “Rather than thinking about things we can’t do, we think about things we can do.”
Inclusion is also at the heart of the EEU’s tradition. Schwartz said the mother of a child with a prosthetic leg said she wanted her daughter to come to the school because “she wanted to be around other people who don’t make a big deal of it.”
Perhaps less well known, however, are the experimental school’s other two missions — applied research into best practices for teaching children with developmental disabilities and professional development for students and working teachers.
Norris told how even in the EEU’s earliest days, in a location across from University Village, the small school began working with mildly disabled children and then expanded its focus. As a result of substantial funding from the U.S. Department of Health, the University was able to construct the building the EEU now occupies. “Then we were able to add children who ranged from the most severe — such as deaf-blind — to very able students, such as many children with autism,” Haring said.
EEU work also showed that with early intervention, children with Down syndrome “were quite educable — surprisingly so,” Haring said, and tested almost as well as normally-developing kindergarteners. “It was interesting and very convincing research, and got quite a bit of national acknowledgement,” Haring said.
Schwartz described more recent efforts at the EEU to find strategies for helping students with autism or severe behavior problems. “We have a citywide program where teachers … come here to receive training on how best to work with kids with challenging behaviors,” she said.
The EEU’s third mission is personified by its Professional Development Unit, which assists undergraduate and graduate students in education and other areas such as psychology, speech and hearing sciences, occupational and physical therapy and even nursing and pediatric medicine.
Schwartz said the Haring gift will help draw the best students, who in turn become the best professionals in the field.
“When I look at the people I most respect in special education, many of them came here as doctoral students. This is where they trained,” she said. Doing studies like that of children with Down syndrome, she said, “they were turning out new knowledge, and that’s what good graduate students can do.”
Norris Haring agrees heartily. He said the family gift reflects their view that education is every bit as important to support with funding as science, medicine or law. “I’ve been dissatisfied with the financial support that goes into education,” he said. “Education is one of the most important endeavors we can contribute to in our service to society.”
The school’s name change will be made official on April 1, during the annual conference — this year in Seattle — of the Council for Exceptional Children, an international association dedicated to improving the educational success of students with disabilities or special gifts. The occasion will allow the school to invite special education experts from the association to visit and celebrate its expanded future.
Though the larger gift lies in the future, the Harings are already supporting the EEU with two other graduate fellowships. The first was filled this year and the second is under way. Haring said he recently had lunch with the first graduate fellow and some faculty colleagues. “It’s a great pleasure to be able to enjoy this,” he said.
Schwartz, who will remain director as the EEU becomes the Haring Center, said the generous gift will enable the research center to conduct “very high-quality research” that will in turn unlock other financial support.
“It’s kind of a booster shot for us, to help us reinvigorate the ‘experimental’ part of the Experimental Education Unit,” she said.
Norris and Dorothy Haring wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We’re both in harmony with this because we’re both educators,” he said, and she nodded in agreement.
