Apply Today to See What School Can Be…
Accepting applications the 2025-26 school year for immediate and mid-year placements : apply today!
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Accepting applications the 2025-26 school year for immediate and mid-year placements : apply today! 〰️
Find out how we can help your child unlock their gifts, and prepare them for a future defined by their strengths
Cajal Academy is a small, innovative school at the heart of a non-profit dedicated to educational innovation. We offer a pioneering program for bright and intellectually-gifted students in grades K-12 who have high analytical reasoning and/or creative thinking skills, including students who have an area of learning, physio, neurological, social-emotional and/or chronic medical differences.
Other public, private and special education settings accommodate these complex profiles, filling the gap between the child’s disabilities and the mainstream expectations. We transform them, through a neuroscience-based and research-backed approach that reduces the gap itself, using a neurodevelopmental approach available only at Cajal Academy that identifies and enhances the “splinter” neurocognitive and neurophysiological skills that drive those challenges, while giving students the understanding they need to assimilate these new skills into an empowered self-identity.
This ground-breaking approach is set within highly-individualized, comprehensive Student Growth Catalysts that transform as our students’ profiles do, empowering them to assimilate these new skills into new understandings of themselves and their possibilities. Meanwhile, our students engage in purposeful academic work tailored to developing the critical thinking, executive function and leadership skills that these inherently innovative thinkers will need to realize their unique ways of seeing the world as the adults that this approach empowers them to be, through our unique, Vision to Voice Curriculum.
Our small, nurturing community and mixed-age cohort play a key role in giving students the space and peer support required to make these transformations possible. For students with social anxieties and other social challenges, it enables them to master social skills that have led our students to be recognized in community-based settings for their leadership.
We are the only full service school in Connecticut or the suburbs of New York City that works with this group of kids. We are the only ones in the world to offer these transformational services.
Come see what’s possible.
Here’s how to apply for our program:
1. Apply Online
2. On Site Interview Day
3. Admission & Tuition Decision
Two more steps at some point during our admissions process…
Attend an Information Session
All parents must attend an Information Session during the admissions process, but we leave it for you to decide whether you’d like to do so before or after applying.
Schedule a Zoom with our Head of School
We want to hear directly from you about your child’s needs! Scroll down or click through to select a time from our co-founder’s schedule that works for you.
Our Student Growth Catalysts increase student abilities while we decrease their tuition
Declining Tuitions
At a time that other private school costs are soaring, our student programming fees decrease—sometimes by as much as $30,000 or more—as your child’s abilities increase and they progress to the next Growth Catalyst Stage. In many cases this will bring Cajal within statutes permitting school districts to contract with schools not on the “state approved” list.
Affording Cajal Academy
The power of our Student Growth Catalysts fundamentally changes both the life-lived and financial “return on investment” for programs at Cajal. Learn about the many ways that families seek to cover the cost of our program, from flexible tuition arrangements to tax deductions to seeking school district reimbursements, .
Information for School Districts
Visit our Resource Center for school districts and professionals for more information about placing your students at Cajal Academy, and new public-private partnerships we are developing to bring the benefits of our work to a broader base of families and educators.
Rolling Admissions, with Multiple Ways to Experience Cajal’s Unique Program
Mid-year Placements
We have openings for immediate enrollment in our elementary, middle and high school programs. Programming and tuition levels are determined through the admissions process, so interested families are encouraged to complete our online application.
Diagnostic Placements
The transformational change students make with our Student Growth Catalysts starts with a paradigm shift in how we understand student needs, and a second paradigm shift in what we do about it. Make a diagnostic placement to Cajal to get the benefit of our approach, and highly-expert therapists working with students every day.
Summer Program
Discover new interests, make new friends and unlock and develop your gifts! Project-based learning, social connections and expert therapies combine to empower students in our unique summer program for exceptionally bright kids with specialized needs.
Workshop Wednesdays Enrichment Program
Students from the community are invited to join our new Workshop Wednesdays series to gain social & executive function skills in a 3-hour project-based learning “sprint” with our currently-enrolled students!
