ABOUT US

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Talia Seidman was a bright, beautiful child with a love for life and learning. Her greatest joy was to be in school with her friends and teachers. Talia was diagnosed with brain cancer at the age of five and her fight for life soon began. Although her medical treatment was often torturous the anticipation of getting back to school was a tremendous motivation to her. Two and a half years into her illness, Talia was no longer able to bounce back. Physically disabled from disease, surgery, and treatment Talia could no longer attend school. This was certainly a severe blow to her psyche. Ron and Andrea Seidman, Talia’s parents, who are professional educators and owners of schools for Early Childhood Education, understand the need that critically-ill children have for continued educational experiences and social interaction with their peers. They have personally witnessed the isolation, loneliness and fear children suffer in hospitals and when they are homebound and unable to attend school. During Talia’s treatment in New York Ron and Andrea brought education to Talia in her hospital room. Everyone, including her doctors marveled at how Talia’s room was transformed into a friendly place of learning with student’s artwork and lessons. What was very important was that she had social interaction with people other than family or medical staff which was a distraction from the horrors of her medically fragile situation. In addition her continuing education helped Talia lift her self-esteem as she was engaged in the learning process instead of just the medical process. Ron and Andrea soon realized that next to home and family, school is the most important part of a child’s life, and along with the priority of physically saving a child’s life are the crucial components of social interaction and intellectual stimulation.

When a cancer diagnosed child is hospitalized, it is vital to their well-being to stay connected with his/her teacher and classmates. Children attend school not only for instruction but also to develop communication and social skills. Literally thousands of hospitalized or homebound children are unable to attend school, and therefore receive little or no educational services! Their lives are void of the normalcy of a child’s life while filled with new horrors of needles, doctors, and drugs. These children have access to the best medical care in the world but have little or no access to intellectually stimulating services for continuing education while fighting their disease. Ron, having a background in technology, knew that through technology more could be done for these medically fragile children. The TSF program virtually takes medically fragile children, who are unable to attend school, into the same classrooms that they previously attended prior to diagnosis using real-time interaction through the use of state-of-the-art video and web-conferencing technology.

The Talia Seidman Foundation uses all of the funds we receive to purchase equipment and services. We then take that equipment loan it to homebound students and their regular classrooms, so the child is able to videoconference into class on a daily basis.

We do not ask for any form of payment from the child, school or school district. Our goal is to ensure that students are not selected on the basis of being to afford the equipment or the service.

The foundation also provides full technical support to both the school's IT department and the child at home.