Lorianne Hoenninger, educator for special needs children, dies

Lorianne Hoenninger, an educator and consultant who helped thousands of Long Island children with special needs in a career that spanned nearly 50 years, died March 5 at Stony Brook University Hospital.

She was 63.

The cause was a brain aneurysm, said her partner of 40 years, Roger Shadlowsky. They lived in Shirley.

The two founded and ran for the last 30 years a small agency, Accessible Learning Technology Alternatives, that provided technological solutions for children with disabilities to most of Long Island’s school districts, along with private schools and families. Their field is called assistive technology.

Hoenninger worked both high- and low-tech and everywhere in between. That ranged from software to turn speech into text, or vice versa, for children with problems reading or writing, to foam stickers designed to help those with motor skills deficits turn the pages of a book.

“She pioneered assistive technology for the past 30 years on Long Island,” said Ruth Fuller, an assistive technologies specialist working on Long Island who got her start in the field working with Hoenninger. Play, and a recognition of children’s innate playfulness, was important to Hoenninger’s work, Fuller said.

In the late 1970s, Hoenninger and Shadlowsky created two toy lending libraries, one in Nassau County and one in Suffolk, scouring flea markets to find affordable switch-operated electronic toys they modified to turn on and off with a push. A child could communicate with caregivers using an array of such toys, turning on one to express hunger, another for thirst.

Today, a computer tablet might enable many of these functions. But for decades, Hoenninger jury-rigged much of what she needed. “She would hook up all sorts of concoctions,” said Susan Kosser, director of pupil personnel services for East Rockaway schools. “Her car looked like a metal factory. She’d hook things up and make it work.”

Sometimes funding was short. She still made it work. “We collected deposits on soda cans to raise money for communication devices,” she told an interviewer in 2011, recalling her work in the 1970s at United Cerebral Palsy.

Hoenninger was born July 20, 1954, in Ridgewood, Queens, and raised in Old Bethpage. Her mother, the former Rosemarie Geber, was head of the cash office at Stern’s Department Store; her father, Wilfred Hoenninger, was a steamfitter in New York City.

After graduating from the school now known as the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut, where she studied elementary and special education in the early 1970s, she received a master’s degree in special education from Adelphi University.

Hoenninger also is survived by a sister, Mary Tortorella of Wantagh, according to public records.

A Mass will be celebrated at 9 a.m. Saturday in St. Frances de Chantal Church, 1309 Wantagh Ave. in Wantagh. She was cremated.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.