Author: Don Adams

Every day, someone somewhere prepares to open a school. In the United States, since the advent of charter schools, each year many schools open and close, for a variety of reasons. The process of opening a school is, in some fundamental ways, easier today than it has ever been.

But I wonder how one could open a great school and serve a population the most in need. Here at The Academy, we worked hard for a decade before becoming what many have described as a great school. I think about what we did throughout the process and offer this as a primer for those looking to do the same.

My advice would begin and end with the notion of community. Building a community is infinitely more challenging than building a school. Community takes infinite ingredients and nonstop attention. Community cares for people. It makes us feel as if we belong. Community, not a sugar-and-taurine-laden energy drink, gives us wings.

How to build community in a school is more art than science. It begins and ends with respect. By creating a safe place where people, their opinions, thoughts, and actions are valued, you’re on the right track. There needs to be balance, focus, constant and consistent improvement.

The construction of a great school is never, ever complete.

Don Adams, Head of School

Over the years, an education system was created for children that took pressure as one of its foundational points. We all remember it from our own education, a snakes and ladders game or preparation, rote memorization, seemingly pointless testing. We remember how we felt when we were on that treadmill and we empathize with stories about students today who have to endure the same and worse.

On Friday, the New York Times published a superb piece on this, which you can read here.

It’s a very humane piece, one that examines why some students seem to deal reasonably well with the pressure of school while others come close to completely falling apart. I highly commend this article to you and ask that you share this blog post among your family and friends – it’s truly a piece that everyone should read.

I get stuck on phrases such as “Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future.” That makes no sense to me, and it actually and fortunately runs counter to the direction we’re heading here in Ontario, Canada. Our Ministry of Education now mandates a form of student assessment that takes into account the totality of a student’s work over a course, including upward trends and more weight being gives to good work (a product of a student’s cumulative learning) late in a term or semester. In other words, a student doesn’t pay too large a price for one of two missteps in a course; rather a holistic perspective is taken whereby, contrary to what we see in the article, the teaching and learning in class is at least as important as a somewhat arbitrary final result.

Intellectually as well as practically, the fact that so many school systems are stuck in the antiquity that is the focus of the article is silly. Few jobs in this world focus only on the final result or see success through a standardized lens. We see success in our labours as an ongoing thing, our achievements as a product of a body of learning. We acquire experience and walk down a longer road of success.

I flash back to the words of David Bowie in his classic song about pressure (and a remarkable collaboration with Queen’s Freddie Mercury) where he sings:

Insanity laughs, under pressure we’re cracking
Can’t we give ourselves one more chance

Yes. I think we should.

Don Adams, Head of School

Last night I made the mistake of flipping through the dial and a bigger mistake of settling in on the CBC news broadcast from Vancouver. There, I watched a remarkably sad story about an autistic child who doesn’t speak and his wait for therapy. You can read all about the story here.

As you know, I have more than a passing interest in this issue given that I’m the Head of School of Canada’s leading high school for young adults with learning style differences and learning disabilities. We pride ourselves on a lot here, nothing more so than providing thorough and immediate services to our school population.

Back to the story, this child is 4 years old and has been waiting for speech therapy for close to three years. In fact, from his initial referral to this first appointment, the wait was (seriously) 920 days.

It gets better. British Columbia has what’s known as a “no-wait policy,” for autistic children to get therapy. Before we point fingers at BC, the sad reality is that here in Ontario it’s much, much worse. The wait time for therapy here, as per the news article, can be up to four YEARS.

The reality of treatment for autism should mirror the reality of services at our school. Here, students wait for nothing – the services they need are provided daily. And even though we are a private school, we are a part of the YMCA, meaning that we will never turn a mission-appropriate student away because of a family’s inability to afford our tuition.

I hope that this news story drives some change in BC and makes us all better consumers of what our children need. I hope it also helps redefine the term “no-wait,” for people who need to interpret and implement policy.
Don Adams, Head of School

For many young people with a learning disability, schools begins with failure. That failure is a cumulative failure in that they begin to experience problems in school, those problems amplify, the help they need is late or entirely absent, then the cycle usually repeats. It is also a series of individual, often daily failures, where a variety of lessons not absorbed (academic, social, a combination of both and more) repeats upon itself to the point of implosion. Imagine starting every school day knowing that from that point until the end of the day, things will more likely than not go straight downhill.

We have built our schools on the notion that students are responsible for their own success. We expect that the metrics of success are a product of hard work and applying oneself to the tasks at hand. It’s an ethic that works only with some students some of the time.

Imagine how lucky we are at The Academy when we get to invert failure, as we do every single day. When we give students the tools to be successful not in a haphazard way, but consistently, deeply, broadly. This success, as you can imagine, carries outside the classroom and school walls, as it is also met with a change of attitude.

I would like to remind you of something I have previously written when discussing how The Academy changes a student’s trajectory and life. Have a look here. When we talk about success, we are talking about measurement. We are able to show prospective families exactly how we do what we do as a school and community.

As always, we welcome the opportunity to meet you and share what we have accomplished over the history of our school with you. When we talk about mission-appropriate students for The Academy, that conversation begins with our mission: to help you and to help your child.

Don Adams, Head of School