Woodside school for kids with autism will move to Long Island
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Tiegerman Middle School in Woodside will relocate to Glen Cove. Photo via Google Maps.
By David Brand
A Woodside middle school for children with autism spectrum and speech disorders will relocate to a new Long Island site in time for summer school to begin.
Tiegerman Middle School on 47th Avenue near Queens Boulevard is part of the Tiegerman network of schools, which provide a “highly specialized language immersion program” to enable students to overcome their “learning disabilities,” according to the school network’s website.
“At Tiegerman, we are not interested in teaching children to identify colors, shapes and numbers,” the school’s website states. “We are interested in teaching children to talk about their experiences, their thoughts and their feelings. We are interested in teaching children to acquire knowledge outside of the classroom by learning to ask questions.”
The middle school employs 35 non-union workers who will be affected by the relocation, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification on the state Department of Labor website. The school did not respond to request for comment about what would happen to those employees.
Tiegerman closed on a vacant building in Glen Cove, which once housed the Coles School, in August 2018 and planned to begin this year’s summer term in the new facility. The school’s attorney told Newsday that Tiegerman planned to pay more than $3 million to renovate the building and add new heating and cooling systems.
The nonprofit leased the building in Woodside and moved because the facility did not have a gym or auditorium, founder Dr. Ellenmorris Tiegerman told Newsday in a statement last year.
“The Coles School will provide us with a chance to reinstate these programs and provide our students with an enriching education that includes not only academic instruction, but Creative Arts Therapies,” Tiegerman said.
Tiegerman also operates a high school in Richmond Hill and an elementary school in Glen Cove.
