Our students have a very wide array of special needs, providing a rich diversity of experiences that benefits all our students, and a home for students having even the most complex overlapping diagnoses and/or who are considered to be “in a cohort of one.”

Common learning and social-emotional difficulties represented in our student body include ADHD, sensory processing disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, fine and/or gross motor coordination disorders, social cognition challenges, ASD, anxiety, depression, task avoidance, school refusal and more.

We also support students having chronic medical conditions. We are proud to be the first school in the world that offers specialized instruction empowering students with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and its common comorbidities, including POTs, dysautonomia, mast cell activation syndrome, chronic pain and chronic fatigue syndromes.

All applicants must have a recent neuropsychological or psycho-educational assessment, including standardized intelligence testing. Any additional OT, PT, SLP or other testing that is available for the child should also be provided. Our team looks at the data in these evaluations for indications of exceptional verbal comprehension, fluid reasoning and/or visual-spatial abilities. Typically one or more of these scores will in the 88th to 99.9th percentile, however lower scores may be considered where the child has diagnoses (including but not limited to certain language processing difficulties, mood disorders and chronic medical conditions) known to our clinicians to suppress these scores.

Cajal Academy does not consider full scale IQ and we do not require prior designation as “gifted.” Many of our students have low working memory and/or processing speed, and this does not bar admissions.

Yes and no, depending on how you are defining “Therapeutic School.” We provide expert services delivered by licensed therapists, through a treatment model that is deeply integrated across the program, supporting the wide range of learning, social, emotional and neurophysio needs of students with high intellectual abilities.

We are not a behavior management school. Some but not all of our students have significant emotional difficulties, and we have been very successful at helping these students to learn how to understand and self-manage those needs in a sustainable manner that transfers across settings.

Many twice exceptional students develop maladaptive behaviors, including defiance, task avoidance, school refusal and social behaviors that are not pro-social as a way to protect themselves emotionally. We understand these behaviors as indicative of hypervigilance to the possibility of failure, which is very common among kids with the jagged profiles and/or uneven distributions of intelligence that are common among “2e” kids. We address these differences by helping students to understand their own profiles, and the ways that they are influencing their learning and social behaviors. This leads to cross-setting changes reported by our parents often in as little as 4-6 weeks.

Cajal is not a behavior management school and does not follow ABA precepts. We are not an appropriate setting for students with a history of physical aggression towards staff or peers.

Our cohort of students spans a wide age range by design, for a number of reasons. First, it has been widely acknowledged that twice exceptional students tend to form kinships more easily with kids who are older or younger than themselves than with kids their own age. We find that our older students benefit from having the opportunity to lead, teach and mentor their younger peers, who in turn benefit from having older role models.

Academically, our students learn standards-based instruction within ability-based groupings. Some of our students may be several grade levels ahead in one subject and multiple grade levels behind in another, so having a mixed age cohort offers greater opportunities to learn with an appropriate learning peer.

Yes. Our program is expressly designed to prepare our bright, gifted and profoundly gifted students to be independently successful in mainstream college environments, including where appropriate Ivy League environments, and our first graduate went on to study at RISD: the top college in his field. We engage our full academic and clinical team to support students in all aspects of the college process, from identifying potential future schools to doing the difficult emotional processing required to write a powerful college essay.

All of that being said, we support multiple pathways for students and understand that college is not always the correct path for all students. We are committed to supporting our students on whatever pathway is most meaningful and appropriate for them. 

Yes. Our curriculum is aligned to Connecticut state standards appropriate to the child’s grade level or, where they are either accelerated or behind in a given subject, based on their ability level. Curriculum is delivered in ability-based groupings, however curriculum units are aligned across the curriculum to correlate to school-wide project based learning units that are specifically tailored to foster the strengths and meet the special education needs of our students’ very high analytical abilities. Each project follows a standardized design process, fostering development of executive function, social collaboration and critical thinking skills that transfer across settings and disciplines. All curriculum is differentiated to enable students to access their high analytical skills, by reducing demand for neurocognitive skills that are areas of relative weakness.

Cajal Academy’s program integrates expert diagnostic and treatment services by licensed clinicians in the following fields: occupational therapy, sensory integration therapy, visual perceptual therapy, physical therapy, psychological counseling (PhD-level), clinical neuropsychology, cranial-sacral therapy and speech and language pathology. 

We have been granted Candidacy status by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and look forward to completing the process.

Currently, no. We continue to evaluate whether it is feasible for us to become state-approved while continuing to deliver the innovative educational and therapeutic approaches that have brought transformational changes for our students that have not been possible under other educational models.

No. ABA therapy focuses primarily on altering the student’s response to a given situation in favor of a more appropriate response. Our Neuro- and Trauma-Informed approach leverages our students’ very high analytical reasoning skills by (1) providing them with a scientific understanding of their own profiles and how those profiles influence their learning and social-emotional experiences, (2) helping them to assess how their behaviors either help or hinder their desired social and academic goals and then (3) learn how to “drive a moment of choice” between their reactions and their responses. This approach is proving successful at bringing changes that transfer across settings, including for students with complex profiles, ASD, sensory processing challenges and autonomic dysfunctions from a variety of causes.

As with other trauma-informed schools, Cajal Academy is based on the premise that children must feel safe in order to learn. We have added to this neuroscientific understandings that in order to experience the emotional safety required to learn, one must be in a state of neurophysiological regulation. This understanding is then infused throughout our social-emotional and behavioral response, both as a toolbox for helping a student to attain better learning and social-emotional outcomes by improving their neurophysio regulation, and in helping us to collaboratively identify what problem the child needs our help to solve within a given situation. We call this approach, developed here at Cajal, a “Neuro- and Trauma-Informed Approach.”

Each child’s program is customized to reduce their special education needs, increasing the range and choice in educational settings in which the child is able to be successful. Depending on the child’s profile and the duration of their time enrolled at Cajal, this may include the ability to return to a general education population within mainstream public or private schools. Students who no longer require customized programming or supports are welcomed to remain at Cajal within our Core Program, so that they may continue to take advantage of the gifted educational approaches that are integrated throughout our program for all students.

Tuition for each child’s customized program is calculated based on the cost required to build up the skills that are currently lacking, in each area that causes academic and/or social difficulty for this child as of the beginning of the current term. Tuition levels take into account that the work required to move a child forward will shift over the course of the program between clinical disciplines, as the child builds up foundational skills and then shifts to more sophisticated skills that build upon them.

Tuition levels fall within a broad range, just as the diversity in our student profiles do, and tuition levels are reduced over time as the child’s profile becomes less complex in response to the program.

Tuition for our Core Program Level is $47,500 per year; students who are not eligible for this programming level receive a customized program with costs ranging from $72,000-180,000.

Yes, our tuitions include the costs of all therapies. Parents are discouraged from seeking additional tutoring or therapy services outside of school in order to avoid conflicting treatment approaches. The exception to this is that families are encouraged to continue outside counseling services, with whom our psychologist can collaborate on matters unrelated to the child’s in-school functioning and growth. 

Part of the effectiveness of our program comes from the fact that therapeutic services (including self regulation, social skills, executive function, gross and fine motor, visual perceptual, etc.) are, wherever possible, integrated into classroom activities and settings, helping the student to generalize those skills. These are quintessentially multi-disciplinary efforts, requiring significant cross-training and collaboration among the various clinicians who are working with the child, and the mix of therapeutic, academic and social programming is adjusted over the course of the child’s program, as they respond to the interventions. For these reasons, it is not possible for us to separate out the therapeutic service costs.

Generally speaking, no. For various regulatory reasons, the only services that we are able to direct bill are cranio-sacral treatments.

The Core Program level is only available for students who do not require therapeutic services or additional differentiation and supports beyond those that are inherent to our program for all students–such as daily morning sensory sessions, small class sizes, close teacher relationships and our multi-disciplinary project based learning curriculum. Students who have learning disabilities, regulatory difficulties, social skills deficits, sensory processing disorder, chronic medical conditions and other difficulties requiring customized support are not eligible for this programming level.

Tuition for each child’s customized program is calculated based on the cost required to build up the skills that are currently lacking, in each area that causes academic and/or social difficulty for this child as of the beginning of the current term. While we cannot guarantee the results for any given child, our program has proven effective at making measurable reductions in learning, physio and social-emotional challenges over the course of our five year operating history. Each child’s tuition is reevaluated as the end of the academic year, in connection with reviewing progress with respect to building up the foundational neurodevelopmental skills that have been interfering with their academic and/or social development, and assessing the therapeutic work that remains in order to reduce those impairments. In many cases, this results in a tuition reduction over time, as the complexity in the child’s profile reduces.