The Netanya Foundation has donated nine computer work stations, a television and new furniture for the computer room at the Yehuda Halevi School. The Yehuda Halevi School in Netanya is an inter-city school serving youth/young adults with mild to multi-problematic medium-level retardation and autism from the ages of 12 to 21. There are 113 students in the school, divided into three age groups: youth, teens, and graduates.

​These youth with special needs contend with emotional, behavioral, and social cognitive difficulties, disrupting their planning, generalization, transference, abstraction, evaluation and critical abilities as well as the capacity to draw conclusions, and find it difficult to carry out reflective thought. The emotional difficulties are manifest in low self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, poor motivation, passivity and low frustration tolerance.

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The behavioral complexities are discernible in impulsive manners and attention and concentration disorders, and the social problems involve interpersonal-communication deficiencies rooted in difficulty with written and spoken language expression, lack of basic skills to create meaningful social connections and tools to analyze social situations, and an absence of examination and judgment skills which are essential for understanding social situations.

 

The computer room at the Yehuda Halevi School was in a dysfunctional state, as the computers have been in operation for over 6 years and some of them are no longer in use. Moreover, the size of the screens (16 inches) did not enable good viewing, and operations required an instructor’s workstation with connection to a slide projector/ television so that the teaching staff could teach the students and properly