Our History

The Switzer Learning Center began as the South Bay Center for Educational Therapy in a leased storefront in Hermosa Beach in 1966. Offering an innovative educational therapy program to a few students with learning disabilities, our co-founder Dr. Janet Switzer’s after- school educational therapy became a groundbreaking model for working with children with learning and emotional problems. In 1972, our services were expanded to include a nonprofit, nonpublic, special education school; and the new Switzer Center moved to Torrance.

Dr. Switzer was a nationally known educator of children with learning disabilities. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She then moved to Los Angeles in 1962 and was a director of teacher training at the Marianne Frosting Center of Education Therapy in Altadena.

She moved to the South Bay and founded the Switzer Learning Center in Torrance in 1972. “She always told the story that in college she struggled in making a choice between being a teacher or helping kids,” Judy Borck (co-founder) said. “She always felt that when she opened the center she had at last found the combination of the two.”

Dr. Switzer lectured at UCLA, and helped treat over 5,000 children with learning disabilities, as well as, emotional problems. She offered diagnostic testing, educational therapy and more. Her ideas seemed radical when she began the Center.

Dr. Switzer also co-founded the National Association of Educational Therapists and the California Association of Special Education Services.