Head of School

This year, we’re going to run a competition for students with learning style differences and learning disabilities from around the world. We’re going to ask them to design their ideal school.

Why?

First and selfishly, we think that over the past decade or so, we’ve built a superb small urban high school for students with learning style differences and learning disabilities. While we’re not looking for pats on the back, we’re always looking to improve and refine our school. Why not seek advice from our clients?

But, more importantly, we think that for a student who, because of learning issues, has experienced a lot more failure than success in school, this exercise can be therapeutic. By designing the school they wish they could attend, they can help make it possible for others to one day attend a school that looks like theirs.

How?

Well, we’re going to share the ideas, not keep them to ourselves. We’ll tell school design firms what the students in our contest came up with. We’ll circulate the results to school boards and principals and education ministries. We’ll help spread the word that a huge piece of meaningful school reform should come from the students themselves.

Stay tuned. More on this coming in the fall.

Don Adams, Head of School

Imagine being the only person in a room of twenty-five with a condition that everyone feared and no one understood.

Welcome to the daily life of a student with a learning disability. In every classroom in every city, there is a student with a learning disability. That’s a remarkable thing when you actually think about it. According to disability lawyers in Fairhope, disabled students lives in the shadows for a variety of reasons. He may have never been diagnosed, due to the massive backlog in the public system (certainly in places such as here in Toronto where it might take two years of more for a student to even be tested for a learning disability). She is in a classroom with a teacher who has never had training about how to work with students with learning disabilities. Students with LDs are surrounded by other students who don’t share their condition, who haven’t had the experience or education to understand it and who might isolate them for being different.

This is the bleak, daily reality of a student with a learning disability. We’ve seen and heard this reality through stories our own students have conveyed to us when coming to The Academy. It’s amazing how students with learning disabilities open up when they arrive here, usually their first-ever safe haven in the system of schools that has equally been frustrated with them as students, and has frustrated them as learners.

“…Now at The Academy, everyone fits in.

No one is different from everybody.

Everybody gets the same thing.”

Joseph K, Academy student

Now turn this model upside-down and imagine being one of an entire classroom of students with learning disabilities. And imagine having all of the support you need, every day: from highly-trained teachers to counseling support, to an educational program that not only empowers you, but prepares you for success in life where you’ve experienced only failure in school before. That’s exactly what The Academy is.

We help families make informed decisions about their child’s future. We help students become all they and their parents had hoped they could be. Give us a call, come to the school for a visit, and let us show you how our program works for families. Have a look at our school video for a quick overview of how we affect students’ lives – https://www.ymcaacademy.org/?page_id=3126

Don Adams, Head of School

Being a parent, there are some things you never forget. For example, we remember every success our child has in school, which is usually an easy thing to do because kids are the best communicators of their own efforts. When our children figure out how their efforts translate into success in and at school, it’s a beautiful thing to watch.

But there are kids who rarely get to experience those victories in school, so they and their parents watch from the sideline. They feel less connected, more alienated with every missed opportunity.

There is no time during which this is more pronounced than at the end of an academic year. For some students the final report can be a litany of failure. It memorializes nine months of disconnections, of missed opportunities. The end result is lack of hope and nothing less than dread for the cycle to soon be repeated next school year.

This is time of year that our school inquiries begin to peak. It’s a testament to the strength of character of families who refuse to continue to be reactive in an education system that simply isn’t properly equipped serve their child.

The YMCA Academy has a proven history of success working with students with learning disabilities and learning style differences. New families see and describe a change in their child that is truly transformational. That’s what happens when you invert your child’s education experience, transplanting them from a system where they are an uncomfortable exception to one in which they are an equally important piece of a puzzle of school success.

You can do us a favor today as we all, quicker than we can possible imagine, move together towards the opening of the next school year. You can pass along our school’s website information at here and encourage your friends and family to watch our school video, located on our main page, and to, in turn, pass it on. Our school exists to help families turn around a child’s education history. So please help us, today, to do that with more families who find themselves in need of our school.

Summer is on the horizon. Soon, kids will be singing the words of Alice Cooper: “school’s out for summer.” But in some fundamental ways it’s not.

Play is one important way that kids learn and summer is about play. I would argue that kids learn more actively than ever now. Playing video games, engaging with a computer is active. In some fundamental ways, it’s far more active than engaging with a book, though many educators and parents are hesitant to admit this. Children with psychomotor development issues have been greatly aided by engaging with these technologies and the summer is a time for kids to take self-appointed deep-dives into learning new things with computers and tablets.

To me, learning is learning. Recently, I’ve been doing my own deep-dive into the excellent GarageBand, composing my first few songs as I learn to play guitar. If you’re inclined and not a professional music critic, you can find one of my songs here: http://snd.sc/JaC3j8

When I think about playing with and on GarageBand, I compare it with reading about playing guitar. This is much more active learning for me. It’s experimentation, it’s failure and success in real time, and it’s a lot of fun. Over the summer, with the help of teachers available at www.musicmattersacademy.com, I’m going to get deeper into music composition and learn to play some guitar riffs that I would have earlier believed to be beyond my abilities.

Summer is a great time to push the envelope of one’s ability, to learn new things under the guise of playing, and to find new things to love.

Don Adams – Head of School