Duncan Family’s $10 Million Gift Creates UT Clinic to Help
Children with Developmental and Learning Disorders
HOUSTON – (Feb. 17, 2006)–A $10 million gift to the Children’s Learning Institute at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston will create the Dan L. Duncan Children's Neurodevelopmental Clinic to help children with a wide range of learning disorders.
“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,” said Susan Landry, Ph.D., the Michael Matthew Knight Professor and chief of the Division of Developmental Pediatrics in The University of Texas Medical School at Houston. “This gift allows us to build on the strong expertise that’s here but expand in ways that will really put this clinic on the map. We sincerely thank the Duncan family for their generosity and belief in our programs.”
Randa Duncan Williams, whose 8-year-old son received assistance at the Children’s Learning Institute coping with his dyslexia and improving his reading skills, said the decision to help establish the clinic was a simple one.
“It was an easy choice because we’re dealing with our children, our future,” she said. “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 easily accessible professional help.”
Named for Williams’ father, the Dan L. Duncan Children's Neurodevelopmental Clinic will be housed in the Texas Medical Center, but also will offer outreach programs through area school districts.
“It will employ cutting-edge research about techniques that work with certain types of developmental learning problems,” Landry said.
The University of Texas System Board of Regents officially accepted the gift and approved the naming of the clinic at their Feb. 8-9 meeting.
Landry is director of the State Center for Early Childhood Development at UT-Houston and leads the Children’s Learning Institute, which includes the Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE), Reach Out and Read-Texas and the Center for Academic and Reading Skills (CARS).
Landry’s early childhood school readiness program called TEEM (for “Texas Early Education Model”) recently received a $2 million grant from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation to support implementation of a two-year, $15 million Texas Education Agency grant. The foundation’s grant will help pay for the salaries of mentors in the field who are expanding the TEEM project to 20 Texas communities, or 1,000 classrooms.
Landry said the new Duncan-funded clinic will work within the institute to assist preschool and school-aged children identified with learning difficulties or developmental disorders by using the research-proven techniques developed through CIRCLE.
“There will be this back and forth exchange of information,” Landry said. “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.”
Encouraged by her son’s success, Williams will chair a campaign to raise $40 million over the next five years to benefit the Children’s Learning Institute. The Duncan family’s $10 million donation launches this fund-raising effort.
“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,” Williams said. “My 8-year-old is excited, and we’re excited–he’s a lot more confident now and succeeding in something that he does the majority of his school day.”
Landry has named UT Medical School professor of pediatrics Linda Ewing-Cobbs, Ph.D., first director of the Dan L. Duncan Children's Neurodevelopmental Clinic, which will open in the summer of 2007.
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