Founder Says It Is Time To Move On, Charter school is getting a new chief
The good-bye events have been tearful: a ceremony at the school, a surprise party at East Hampton Point. Dawn Zimmerman Hummel, the founder and executive director of the Child Development Center of the Hamptons, will move to San Diego in mid-August to enroll her son, Jon, in a school for autistic teenagers.
When she decided to build a place for special education students close to their South Fork homes, Ms. Zimmerman Hummel became an unstoppable force, enlisting support from everyone from local softball players, Jimmy Buffett, and Peter Jennings to Senator Kenneth P. LaValle and Gov. George E. Pataki.
A decade ago, faced with a lack of services on the East End for special education students like Jon, Ms. Zimmerman Hummel started a program of her own, and that skills group for preschoolers grew into the Child Development Center of the Hamptons Preschool, where ordinary youngsters learned alongside children with special needs. The preschool spawned a charter elementary and middle school, which opened in 2001.
Now that her son is entering a new phase of his life, Ms. Zimmerman Hummel is ready to move on. "It's a natural progression of what happens - you take things as far as they can go," she said. She is in fact moving "back home." Ms. Zimmerman Hummel grew up in a Los Angeles suburb and was once a junk-bond trader with Michael Milken on Rodeo Drive.
She will not entirely abandon her ties to the East End - she and her husband, John Hummel, will keep their house here, and she will remain a member of the Child Development Center board. But she is handing over the reins as the center's executive director, chief advocate, fund-raiser, and driving force to Donna Colonna.
Ms. Colonna, a resident of Sag Harbor and New York, is the executive director of Services for the Underserved, a nonprofit organization in New York City. Founded in 1978, it serves people with special needs, providing services and serving as an advocate for the elderly or disabled, the mentally ill or homeless, "marginalized" families living with H.I.V./AIDS, and teens and adults with developmental disabilities.
"She's the new me," Ms. Zimmerman Hummel said. Services for the Underserved, Ms. Colonna said yesterday, will help expand the center's mission by providing "more services that kind of wrap around the schools." Examples, she said, will include vocational and life skills training for older students, opportunities for high-school graduates with special needs, and continued development of an early-intervention program for young children.
Construction of a separate building for the C.D.C.H. Preschool, now housed at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton, is high on the agenda. The preschool, with its 120 young students, must vacate its rented space in two years.
Ms. Colonna, who has a background in psychology and 30 years of experience in her field, said she met Ms. Zimmerman Hummel about five years ago, and had helped her set up the charter school. She said she was "honored" to have been asked to step into her shoes. "I give her an incredible amount of credit," Ms. Colonna said. "Besides being a beautiful person, it's so hard to create something from nothing."
School opened last September for the charter school students in a new, 20,000-square-foot building that cost $2.2 million to build. Almost half of that amount came from fund-raising events; the rest was borrowed.
Nearly 100 students from kindergarten through seventh grade attended last year. An eighth grade will be added this year.
Although Ms. Zimmerman Hummel will be elsewhere on the first day of school, disabled and non-disabled charter school students alike will file past her handprint, which is impressed in cement near the front door of the new school, in the Zimmerman Hummel Building of Humanity.