Community Organizer at Anixter Center

Indira Buzaljko is the assistant principle at Anixter Stuart G Ferst Center, which educates mentally challenged youth. It is located on 2001 N. Clybourn Ave. on the third floor 3rd Floor.

The Anixter Center was founded in 1918 by thirteen women who were looking to open an orphanage as a promise to a friend. This promise led to the Douglas Park Jewish Day and Night Nursery. Thirty-seven years later, the organization came to realize that the most critical need in Chicago had changed. So the board created a new mission—to help people with disabilities .Stuart G. Ferst School is a day school for students seven to twenty-one. It combines the best of educational and social emotional support for students with autism and intellectual disabilities to physical challenges and emotional disorders.

Indira graduated from Northeastern Illinois University with a Masters in Special Education in 2003. She works with mentally challenged youth to help them gain the skills necessary for a better life. She told me that children with disorders such as schizophrenia and autism never gain proper skills to lead their lives on their own, but they are very social and they know how to draw, play and communicate with other kids their age, the basic skills of a child. Children with disorders like ADHD and Bipolarity Disorder come to Frest School to learn how to cope with the disorder and lead a normal everyday life.

One of the main things Indira focuses on in the school is pay and art. She feels as though the younger kids bond through playing with each other. The teachers there focus on “teaching through play”—so they take the kids out to the playground, exploring the grounds, looking at animals playing around, helping them color and paint, and read them fu...

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...ganizing will fall apart. She says always keep some sort of planner. “That planner, I promise you, will be your best friend!” Keep an open mind to things, because there will be people who you clash heads with, and if you’re close minded, then you won’t be open to their ideas, which may change your school, organization, community, etc. for the better.

Indira Buzaljko is the assistant principle at Anixter Center, she organizes the daily activities of the kids there. She makes sure they learn through art and play. She loves her job, even with the challenges, because it is more rewarding than anything she could have imagined. She gets the opportunity to watch these kids grow, learn and face the odds working against them.

Works Cited

Anixter Center. (n.d.). - Providing disability services and support. Retrieved November 8, 2013, from http://www.anixter.org/index.php