Doing a pioneer proud for 50 years
The schoolwork taped on corridor walls outside cheerfully decorated classroom doors start to show how Helen J. Stewart school students are taught their worth. One worksheet said an 11-year-old wants to be a photographer when he grows up. Outside of a room around the corner, cutouts of text, smiling stick figures and a schoolhouse glued inside outlines of Nevada declared “I am a citizen — I have the right to go to school.”
Helen J. Stewart, which has been proudly educating students with intellectual disabilities for 50 years, celebrated its present and past with an anniversary bash last week.
Students with special needs may attend neighborhood schools with their typically developed peers, where they sit in the same classrooms or in self-contained rooms inside the same building.
Others may go to one of the four Clark County School District schools that exclusively serve children and young adults with significant disabilities.
Stewart is on Viking Road, off Flamingo Road near Eastern Avenue, on a unique campus with a greenhouse, barn, large courtyard and indoor pool.
Helen Jane Wiser Stewart was a Southern Nevada pioneer, one of the Stewarts for whom Stewart Avenue downtown is named. A mother of five, she was an advocate for formal education.
Three previous principals, plus family members of the principal who launched Stewart and a predecessor program in the 1960s, came out to the anniversary party Thursday, along with some of Helen J.W. Stewart’s descendants.
A longtime school staffer accepted a proclamation from the Clark County Commission recognizing the school’s first 50 years. A historical interpreter portraying the elder Stewart gave a brief biography. Teachers sang the school song.
“It’s a good thing to be known as Helen J. Stewart’s great-great-grandson,” said Clinton Stay Jr., a descendant through Helen J.W. Stewart’s daughter, Evaline.
Helen J.W. Stewart was a member of the board for what would become CCSD in 1916. She donated land in what is now the Historic Westside for the public Las Vegas Grammar School. And she encouraged meaningful lives for children with special needs.
A granddaughter, also named Helen Jane Stewart, lived with a disability as the result of a difficult birth. The younger Stewart is actually the school’s namesake.
“Grandmother Helen poured out all her love in abundance and she relished every single achievement accomplished by her granddaughter,” Stewart Principal Palmer Jackson said. “She wanted young Helen to grow, develop and have a full quality of life, just like our parents and guardians of our students.”