Cheryl

Cheryl Viirand, B.A., J.D., Co-Founder, Head of School, Member of Board of Directors

Cheryl is the visionary behind Cajal Academy, and a “mom on a mission” to empower kids by leveraging modern neuroscientific understandings of how children learn, socialize and grow to remove obstacles to their learning and give them agency and transferable skills that will enable them to thrive independently in college and beyond.

Cheryl is a social entrepreneur, a generalist problem solver and a former corporate litigator at the esteemed firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell. As such, Cheryl brought a keen eye for detail and fresh perspectives to the field of education. Not held back by “how it’s always been done,” Cheryl built an expert team and, with them, resolved to dig into what scientists know today that could help to remove the learning, social emotional and chronic medical barriers that stood in her own children’s way. Being a systems thinker, Cheryl built systems for applying those approaches to a broader array of kids, within an educational environment. This jumping off point is what led to the creation of a whole new approach to education, that is already raising the bar on “what’s possible” with transformative results for kids having a range of different learning, social-emotional and neurophysio needs.

This mission started out as a problem that is all too common for parents with atypical strengths and weaknesses (let alone complex, chronic medical conditions like her own family’s Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome). Connective tissue is the “stuff” that holds a body together, so in connective tissue disorders the leverage to be found is in the intersections between different systems. This led Cheryl and the expert team she had assembled to support her children in the community to be looking at the intersections between different aspects of neurology, immunology and other physiologic systems on the one hand, and their learning and social-emotional experiences on the other. 

Each time Cheryl returned with new science from leading research clinicians in the EDS field, she brought them to Heather Edwards, the visionary occupational therapist who had jumped in with both feet to problem solve how she could re-purpose well-established OT strategies and knowledge to use these physio levers to improve Cheryl’s kids’ focus and attention, train them in how to monitor and report their hidden neurophysiologic experiences and absorb academic content at a visceral level that could withstand body assaults on the learning system. And then they both marveled as their learning and social experiences hit new plateaus they hadn’t thought possible before.

After each such breakthrough, the two consulted with Steven Mattis, PhD, A.B.P.P.: the internationally renowned and extensively published neuropsychologist who had provided evaluations for both her children. Each time, he consulted the literature and returned to report that in fact, good published research suggests that if you do what Cheryl and Heather had trialed, you should get these same, powerful results. In other words, by striving to create ways for her own kids to thrive, Cheryl and her team had tapped into universal human truths—and had found a way to turn those connections into powerful levers we all can learn to use to improve our access to our cognitive and social-emotional skills.

Within a few weeks, Cheryl and Heather saw the power of the approach, and co-founded Cajal Academy in February, 2019 as a non-profit organization with a two-pronged mission. The first is to fill the gaping hole in our region’s outplacement environments by providing a school for students with complex profiles that include high analytical reasoning abilities paired with an area requiring licensed therapy services, including kids with highly complex profiles, chronic medical conditions and twice exceptional kids, among others. Cheryl and Heather had been shocked to discover that there was no outplacement school anywhere in Connecticut or Westchester County that provides both appropriate academics and licensed, expert therapies for this cohort of kids—and vowed to create one.

The second prong, however, goes broader than that. Cheryl, Heather and Steve—and the team they have assembled around them—are big believers in the value of mainstream, high quality public education. Cheryl was privileged to attend an experimental public high school in Columbia, MD with a “gifted and talented” program where extraordinary educators emphasized that intellectual gifts come with an obligation to apply them to help others. (Go Wildecats!). Heather is passionate about her work within a local public school district where she gets to work with kids having a wide array of abilities and skills. So we included in Cajal Academy’s corporate charter a commitment to not only developing but disseminating our findings, so they can benefit kids across the spectrum of educational settings. With our move to our beautiful new cameo setting in the heart of South Norwalk, we are thrilled to have a home in which we can now begin this important next phase of our work.

A quest to make a big impact on the world

Until she was a sophomore in college, Cheryl was convinced she would be a professional flutist—until she realized that she wanted to dedicate her life’s work to using the strong analytical skills that made digging into a sonata by J.S. Bach satisfying to making the world a better place for others. Cheryl spent that summer on a college fellowship in Tallinn, Estonia, where she was blown away by the spirit of possibility and entrepreneurship that pervaded this small country next door to a large and often agitated neighbor in the mid-90’s. One week after graduating from Barnard College, Cheryl was on a plane to Ukraine, where she worked with the Crimean government to help them catalog their hulking post-Soviet tourism assets in preparation for privatization—and then got her first taste of startup work creating the first restaurant guide to the city of Kiev. Returning to the states, she plunged into “dot com bubble” era startups Internet Trading International and Juno Online Services, where she learned the principles of lean startup, and what it means to be part of an organization dedicated to innovation and constant iteration towards your own standard of excellence. Unable to set aside her passions for civil rights, Cheryl went back to school to get her J.D. at New York University School of Law, with a focus on international human rights.

Cheryl left the practice of law in 2008 to dedicate herself to building businesses and non-profit organizations that apply science to increase social inclusion and empowerment for vulnerable populations. Prior to Cajal Academy, Cheryl was the founder, creator and CEO of Freedible, Inc.: a social sharing platform where families with dietary constraints can find and share the recipes, life hacks and community they need to thrive.

Cheryl lives in Connecticut with her husband, dog and younger child, and finds that the joy of seeing her older son thriving in college, back on the path he was always met to travel, far outweighs the ache of an empty chair at the dinner table.