Donors

$10M gift funds neurodevelopmental clinic

By Wendy K. Mohon

On a recent trip to a local fast-food restaurant, Randa Duncan Williams' 6-year-old son read the menu to her. This seemingly mundane task was a proud milestone for both mother and son, demonstrating that weeks of tutoring have helped the first-grader cope with his dyslexia and improve his reading skills.

"It doesn't sound like a big deal to be able to read the McDonald's menu, but it was a big deal for us. He's excited, and we're excited," Williams says. "It's not fun to see your 6-year-old upset and depressed because he's having trouble reading. He's a lot more confident now. He's succeeding in something that he does the majority of his day."

Williams found help for her son through The Children's Learning Institute (CLI) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. She and her family have since chosen to give $10 million to the CLI to fund a clinic designed to research and address a wide range of learning disorders in children.

"We are profoundly grateful to the Duncan family for this generous donation to establish a neurodevelopment clinic devoted to the important work of finding better ways to help children with learning disorders excel in school," says James Willerson, M.D., health science center president.

Williams says the decision to help establish the clinic was "an easy choice because we're dealing with our children, our future. My family has been very blessed in a lot of ways, and we want to help other families get the resources they need without going through what we did to find them," she says.

When Williams' son was first diagnosed with an attention disorder, then dyslexia, she began reading everything she could find on the subjects.

"I started researching learning disorders, and there isn't a really easy way to go through all the information on the Internet," Williams recalls.

Named for Williams' father, The Dan L. Duncan Children's Neurodevelopmental Clinic will be housed within the CLI facilities in the Texas Medical Center, and will offer outreach programs through area school districts and "provide cutting-edge research about techniques that work with certain types of developmental learning problems," according to Susan Landry, Ph.D., director of CLI. She says a priority of the clinic will be to make resources as accessible as possible.

"It's very overwhelming for a family to come into the Medical Center, so we want to be where families can make good use of the clinic," Dr. Landry says. "There are lots of ways that we could do that, for instance, we might partner with The Memorial Hermann System, as well as the school districts in the area."

Dr. Landry notes that all the programs within CLI work together and that the clinic will become part of CLI's reciprocal network. For example, The Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE) has a strong body of research and state funding to study young children and what is needed to enhance their home and learning environments. Work in The Dan L. Duncan Children's Neurodevelopmental Clinic will assist school-aged children identified with learning difficulties or developmental disorders, by using the research-proven techniques developed through CIRCLE, according to Dr. Landry.

"There will be this back and forth exchange of information," Dr. Landry says. "We'll learn things about how to help these children in individually focused ways and that can inform us in how to train teachers to support these children when they're in mainstream classrooms."

The broad age range and scope of research, which will cover infants to young adults and address everything from behavior issues to autism, makes The Dan L. Duncan Children's Neurodevelopmental Clinic the first of its kind in the city of Houston and unique in the country as well.

"It's very unusual to have the opportunity that this gift provides – to have a research effort that specifically targets the advancement of interventions for children who are either at risk for learning disabilities or actually have specific learning problems like dyslexia or math disabilities," Dr. Landry says. "I really think that this gift allows us to build on the strong expertise that's here and expand in ways that will really put this clinic on the map. We sincerely thank Randa and her family for their generosity and belief in our programs."

Dr. Landry has named pediatrics professor Linda Ewing-Cobbs, Ph.D., director of the new clinic. While the clinic will not officially open until the summer of 2007, research projects are already under way and a search will begin immediately to recruit a developmental pediatrician for the clinic and to fill research positions focused on reading, math, behavior and social skills of young children.