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Citation For Special Needs Teaching-Maria Kleinman

A Creative Point of View
Fostering artistic endeavors for special needs students

Marla Kleinman, an art teacher for kindergarten to 12th grade at the Child School/Legacy High School, is known for pushing her students to try new things.

This year, that included entering a haiku by her second grade class in a UN competition. Their poem about pizza received an honorable mention at the award ceremony held in early June, and parents raved about the confidence the experience gave their children.

“Competing against neuro-typical kids, this will be an honor she will never forget,” Sanya Popovic said of her daughter, who helped write the poem. “Marla’s work is beyond therapeutic.”

Kleinman said she wants her students to enter competitions because “they have to live in the real world and everyone has strengths and weaknesses.”

And she has no shortage of ideas about how to draw out her students’ strengths. “Marla Kleinman works with kids who have both language-based and non-verbal disabilities,” Popovic said. “She has helped provide my daughter, who has speech delays, with ways to express herself, both artistically and through poetry.” Last year, Kleinman helped students create artwork that the Visual Artists Association put on display in a real gallery alongside work by students from two mainstream schools on Roosevelt Island. This year she also persuaded the Child School’s PTA to fund what is now the first installment of an annual project called “Poetry on the Go,” inspired by the “Poetry in Motion” series seen in subway cars. Poems by 15 students were laminated and put on display in public buses that run on Roosevelt Island.

Kleinman studied an art form known as sumi-e, or East Asian ink and wash painting, while earning her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, and today she is president of the National Sumi-e Society. She often paints with her students in this style, but is also open to whichever creative outlet they choose. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had had that flexibility when I was 20,” she said, “but they have a lot going on in their lives, and if they can get that peace and tranquility for 45 minutes in art class, then let them.”

Trips to museums, as well as Kleinman’s own art books—which she leaves in the classroom instead of sitting on a shelf in her apartment—are meant to give the students what she refers to as “living skills.”

Parents and students alike are excited by the myriad things Kleinman does with her students, from painting on the promenade overlooking Manhattan to painting sets for the annual June play.

“More important than any individual project, though, is the fact that Marla gives the children a creative point of view towards life,” said Leonard Rothbart, a parent. “[It’s] a gift that will continue to reward them in everything they do.”

— Caroline Lewis