New for Summer, 2025, enroll your child with a Diagnostic “add on” to learn more about your child’s profile, how their learning and physio profiles relate to their social functioning at school and in the community, and how to solve common mysteries from “why do they hold it together all day at school and then explode when they get home” to “how come they always know just what to do — but then never seem to do it” and “how can I get my child to engage in non-preferred tasks?”

All Diagnostic Programs will follow Cajal Academy’s multi-disciplinary and research-backed approach to understanding children’s needs. We use the data in the child’s neuropsychological and neurophysiological profiles to get beyond labels like ADHD, ASD, dyspraxia, dyslexia and more to identify the specific neurocognitive and/or neurophysio skills that drive those challenges. We then work backwards down the neuro-developmental chain to identify missing or vulnerable links that undermine the child’s ability to robustly perform those tasks. This paradigm shift in how we identify the problem that a child needs our help to solve often reveals skills-based connections between seemingly disparate areas of academic, social and/or daily living tasks, and helps to explain emotional difficulties your child may be experiencing at home or at school.

At Cajal Academy, we use these insights as the basis for multi-disciplinary treatment programs that are proving successful at reducing or even removing students’ learning and in some cases social-emotional differences, by applying neuroplasticity to build up the neural networks that the child needs to identified skill through research-backed treatment plans that integrate traditional and Cajal-exclusive methods, with Growth Mindset and Agency coaching that helps the child apply these skills within the school environment. That process requires a longer course and thus those services are not included in our summer sessions.

For students enrolling with a Diagnostic Summer Session, we will provide the first part of this process: a multi-disciplinary assessment connecting the dots across your child’s profile by looking at how the data in their profiles relate to the academic, social and daily living tasks where they struggle. We will start with a full record review and analysis of the evaluations and assessments that you already have for your child, including any shifts or trends within their data where it has changed over time. We will then perform additional formal and informal assessments and observations examining areas that are in our experience commonly overlooked in this cohort of kids but that are necessary to connect the dots across the child’s profile, including physio, language and neuropsychological assessments. Please note that we will not be re-administering tests that have been recently performed, in order to avoid learned practice effects and to reduce the stress that many students experience with formalized testing. As such, we may not perform all of the tests that would customarily be included within a comprehensive multi-disciplinary evaluation, however we will incorporate the data from prior administrations into our assessment and review.

At the end of the Summer Program, we will provide you with a written summary of our findings, and will meet with you (and, if you like, your child’s school or community-based team) in conferences to be held July 31 and August 1 to explain our findings. We will also share with you at that time our recommendations for how we would approach your child’s profile here at Cajal to reduce or remove any learning or social-emotional barriers that have been identified to develop any vulnerable foundational skills that have been identified and successively re-integrate those skills into more sophisticated learning and social-emotional tasks using our research-backed methodology.