Kolburne School Moving Beyond Residential Treatment
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The private school was founded in 1947 by Jeane Weinstein and her parents, Stella and Luma Kolburne, and originally located in Norwalk, Conn., until Weinstein and her husband, Sydney, moved the facilities to New Marlborough in 1967.
There, at the 800-acre Woodruff Campus, students from Grades 3 through 12 who run the gamut of social and learning disabilities have received treatment as well as vocational and social training for the last 43 years. Recently, Jeane Weinstein retired as the school's executive director, leaving Neil Berger, the school's administrative director since 2007, to bring the facility and the programs into a new era of education and, according to him, community outreach.
"Most of this is an evolutionary process that's been unfolding," Berger said in a phone interview last Wednesday. "Jeane's retirement is certainly underlying the changes that are taking place now. It's the first time in the school's history that the Weinstein family is not directly running the school. Our focus has always been on the curative aspects and transitioning the older kids into a life beyond the school because this is a lifelong thing. Now we're looking at what the community needs and what else can we offer to the local community that's multifaceted."
Expanding the school's reach from a private setting to a public resource will admittedly take some time. Berger said the administration is in the process of discussing the proposed transition with many staff members although some of them are still in contract negotiations that have yet to be resolved.
This along with pursuing solid funding for a new nonprofit "therapeutic community" is going to take time, said Maxine Carter-Lome, who was recently hired as Kolburne's communications director. She said the school is in the "preliminary stages" of a transition and has had some dialogue with other organizations, including local schools and adult vocational programs, although no time line is yet in place.
"We're recrafting our new mission and instead of being just a residential school we're looking to be a therapeutic community with a range of services," she said. "How else can we really serve this population as well as the local community? We are broadening our emphasis on career counseling, developing vocational skills and independent living skills."
According to Berger, current mental health and developmental services in Berkshire County and around the country for that matter, are not cutting the mustard when it comes to treating clients and sending them off into a successful life.
"The system out there isn't doing a good job, especially with adults," he said. "There are a lot of needs out there that are unmet. This is new for us, we've not really gone out of the box before but we'd be remiss if we weren't thinking bigger with the resources we already have in place."
