She’s not just a teacher, she’s a special teacher.
Hilda Costello, special education teacher at Liberty Middle School, has donated her life to teaching handicapped children. A lady with four kids of her own, she has taken on one of the greatest challenges of her life in teaching mentally handicapped children.
“I love my kids,” she said of her students. ” We want to get them ready for the real world.”
Costello said that the classroom is set up in such a way that the children learn a while and play a while.
“Our main emphasis is on reading,” she said. First thing in the morning the kids sit in front of the room and she asks them questions about what they did the day before and develops sentences on the board for them to read.
“Then we have sing time,” she said. “It had taken them a long time to learn the songs but you have to keep going over and over them and the kids finally pick up on them.”
“The kids have been learning them for several years but now they have a large selection of songs in their heads,” she concluded.
After lunch Costello takes her five students to her for an hour apartment to participate in aerobics and learn basic skills such as making beds, doing dishes and washing clothes. She considers her apartment “my home away from home, because we live so far out of town.”
Costello hopes that someday her students will be prepared to function normally in the real world.
