Welcome!

Founded in 1981 by Kathleen and David Ross, Helping Hands’ mission is to help developmentally delayed preschoolers prepare for public education. From a farmhouse with 20 students, our five-acre campus has grown into four buildings, serving over 450 preschoolers per year. Our staff totals more than 65. This includes special education teachers, speech therapists, teacher aides, school psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, physical therapists and administrators. Recently we began the Academy Nursery School. In these classes special needs students and their typically developing peers learn side by side.

With this website we hope to extend our preschool community into cyberspace so we can share important information about young children with special needs with parents, relatives and friends, health care professionals, academics, teachers, researchers, and students everywhere. Thanks to support from the New York State Education Department we are taking our files full of effective programs, individual plans of study, case studies like "Tony's Story," an excellent example of the progress of a Down Syndrome child, and innovative teaching strategies, and moving them online so people all over the world can have easy access.

We have posted all kinds of useful information for parents. For example, we explain what developmental delays are, why intervention is necessary, and most importantly, what parents can do and how and where they can find help. In addition to articles about what we do, this site has links to many other online resources.