She can work anywhere, but chooses Matheny

Physical therapy is different at Matheny than in a sports medicine clinic or a nursing home. And Erin Leach should know—she’s worked in all three settings.

“In a nursing home, you can improve someone’s function pretty significantly, but at Matheny, with the kids, there is just so much more energy,” Leach says. “I started to realize that what I do can really help them forever.”

Leach, who was voted the 2011 Related Service Provider of the Year by her peers at The Matheny School, also knows it can require creativity to incorporate PT into classroom settings. One example involved a lesson about where different articles of clothing belong on the human body. “The teacher had a big cutout of a person, and the students were working on where the shirt goes, where the shoes go, things like that,” she says. “They had Velcro clothing and shoes. So, when it was my student’s turn, I helped her walk up to the big cutout and put the shoes on. It was the perfect activity.”

Leach, shown here helping 8-year-old student Niara Holmes, understands that “I’m helping them do something they might not otherwise get the opportunity to do—like sitting up or standing up by themselves. I can look back and say, ‘Wow, they’re doing this much better’—even if it may seem to be a very small thing.”

We invite you to share your experience with our physical therapy services on this page.

Bernards High School in Bernardsville sponsors a Math League made up of students who share a passion for numbers. Last spring, the team’s members decided they wanted to spread that love by raising money to benefit other students in the area, and they chose The Matheny School as one of their beneficiaries.

They held a “Math-A-Thon,” raised $700 and donated the money to the school to support its mathematics program. When the students and their teacher visited Matheny to deliver the gift, we had to snap a photo.

Pictured above, standing, from left:  Kathryn Levin of Bedminster; Nery Aragon of Bernardsville; Matheny principal Sheryl Gavaras; Bernards High math teacher and Math League advisor LuAnn Faletta of Mendham; Isha and Shuchi Zinzuwadia of Bedminster; and David Howes of Bernardsville. Matheny students in front, from left: Yasin Reddick, Zachary Ludlow and Natalie Tomastyk.

Francis Mancho, 18, of Budd Lake wanted to help Matheny students learn entrepreneurship, so he applied his own ingenuity to the task. The volunteer got permission from his church to start a community garden, where he now grows vegetables the students sell at a café they operate twice a week. Because some of the students couldn’t ring up cash-register sales, Mancho applied for—and won—a $3,000 grant from the Jenny Jones Foundation, an organization started by the national TV talk-show host. He used the money to buy two special touch-screen computers, which help the students sell—and improve their cognitive abilities and quality of life.

Read about Mancho’s idea on the foundation’s “Jenny’s Heroes” website, and in an article from the Mount Olive Chronicle newspaper.

Above, from left: Steve Proctor, Matheny president; Francis Mancho’s father, Joseph, and mother, Maureen; Francis Mancho; Gail Cunningham, Matheny coordinator of volunteer activities; and Sean Murphy, vice principal of The Matheny School.