Sad news from SchwabLearning

If you have read this blog long at all, you know that I often post links to articles located on SchwabLearning.com. It is such a wonderful resource for parents whose children have ADHD/LD. I absolutely love the site and have recommended it to others numerous times. Therefore, I was completely shocked and saddened when I recently received an email from it's founders, Charles and Helan Schwab. In essence, the email explained that the website will be closing by the end of this year. I highly recommend that you visit it often between now and then.

Here is the email I received in it's entirety:

Dear Shane,

Exactly twenty years ago, Helen and I established Schwab Learning to help families of children with learning disabilities (LD).

At that time, there were few resources available to help demystify learning and attention problems, and only a handful of philanthropic organizations with a focus on these issues. Since then, our Foundation has invested over $90 million to provide guidance and assistance to parents and their children who struggle with learning. Over the years, the landscape has changed significantly, resulting in greatly increased access to research-based information about navigating life with an LD.

With this history and progress in mind, Helen and I feel a responsibility to focus our attention and resources on addressing learning disabilities through selective grant-making to other organizations, rather than maintaining the operations of our two websites, SchwabLearning.org and SparkTop.org. We are taking this opportunity to consider how we might best advance our impact in the human services, education, civic, and cultural arenas.

In order to increase our focus on grant-making efforts, we have had to consider some very tough choices, and we have made the extremely difficult decision to close our websites by the end of 2007. While we understand that there was no way for you to anticipate this news, we have always felt that we are partners with the parents, educators, experts, researchers, and scientists who are working together to help kids with LD succeed. Toward that end, we and our staff feel it is important for you to be aware of our plans and this very recent and difficult decision. Please know that our team is working aggressively to facilitate the best transition path for making our resources available to you through other appropriate organizations.

We will keep you informed as our plans evolve. In the meantime, all of the features and services we provide will remain fully operational.

Sincerely,

Charles and Helen Schwab