Support our work to redefine what’s possible for a child, a school and education as a whole.

Cajal Academy is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing new educational approaches that align with current neuroscience. The school we operate in the heart of SONO is the only one in all of Connecticut or Westchester County for kids who have very high analytical or creative skills paired with an area of special needs (often called “twice exceptional”).

We’ve made a major break-through for the field of education: a research-backed approach that’s proving effective at reducing or even removing learning disabilities and some social-emotional difficulties.

Traditional special education is based on the outdated notion that learning, executive function and social-emotional “disabilities” are immutable: that they are the result of how the child is “wired” and thus all we can do is to accommodate them.

Modern neuroscience suggests otherwise, and our work proves we can do more.

We reengineered all aspects of school from the bottom up, and made a paradigm shift in how we understand children’s challenges, setting aside the diagnostic labels that describe what their challenges look like, and getting into the array of individual strengths and weaknesses that drive that presentation. Then we pinpoint which specific skills are holding the child back in a given area and enhance the child’s capacity to perform it, through a series of physical activities that drive neuroplasticity. The result is a hockey stick-shaped growth curve, unlocking students’ access to enjoy those strengths they already have.

The results have been transformative for the kids in our program, often in less than a single school year. Like a 7th grader who went from a 1st grade level in both reading & writing to on grade level in just 6 months’ time. Or a middle schooler who went from hiding in a closet to sleep away camp in a bunk with 30 peers in just one school year. Or our first graduate, who found his passion for design while overcoming a life-threatening medical crisis with a two year recovery, severe social anxiety, ADHD & expressive language challenges—and is now thriving academically and socially at the top art school in the country. These are just a few of the transformations our students have experienced at Cajal Academy.

Solving the special education funding crisis lies in demanding better outcomes for our kids

Today, towns across the country are struggling under the weight of serving our children’s special education needs. It’s an issue that affects us all and one that we can all agree needs to be solved—no matter what your political position.

As we’ve seen the transformations that are possible through our very different approach, we’ve become convinced that this solution lies not in trying to do the same approach with less funding, but in applying science to reduce or remove their challenges — not just churning year on year with an accommodationist approach. By evening out gaps in a child’s neuropsychological profile, we transform their future while meaningfully reducing the complexity of their educational needs. For some kids, that will mean that after just a couple of years of interventions under our approach, even some of our most complex learners may be ready to shift into a general education population, removing the need for an IEP altogether. That dramatically reduces the cost of educating that child across their K-12 lifetime, while opening up untold opportunities and economic productivity for the future.

We need your help to broaden the impact of this ground-breaking approach.

Unlike most big innovations, we didn’t have a big research university or well-funded grants or even a small foundation behind us to do this work — we’ve done it all out of tuition-based funds, while holding our tuitions in line with other special education and therapeutic schools in our community that can only accommodate challenges that we’ve been successfully able to remove.

This ground-breaking approach came out of the efforts of a small, tight knit team run by a mom (and former corporate litigator) who refused to accept that her children’s futures would be limited by challenges that science suggested could be solved. Joined by a visionary OT, we started over with current neuroscience and redesigned every aspect of “school” from there. Together with a passionate team of educators and licensed therapists, we centered this work within a K-12 school, propelling both academic and social-emotional growth by integrating the strategies into the real world scenarios where students need them most. We were joined by an renowned neuropsychologist recognized as one of the founding fathers of the field of clinical neuropsychology in the US, who came on board because he had never in 50 years of practice seen student changes like the ones that can happen in a matter of months at Cajal, and just had to figure out how, as a matter of neuroscience, they work.

Your donation to our Scholarship Fund can help transform the future for a child, and for education as a whole

We developed these exciting approaches working with 5-10 kids at a time: just the way you’d want to re-engineer education from the ground up. In November, 2024 we moved into a beautiful, 20,000 square foot facility in the heart of South Norwalk that gives us the space we need to scale our school up to our desired cohort of 50 students. We’re already receiving requests from districts as far away as Virginia to share our findings and teach public educators how to do what we do: a core piece of our charitable mission. But with the current disruption in the education space, our families are struggling to access public funding to help support their students’ tuition, slowing the pace of our innovation work and thus the time frame on which we can start to publish and disseminate this work.

That means that your contribution to our Scholarship Fund has a double impact. First, it helps gives a child in our community access to Cajal Academy’s transformational program. Second, by increasing the number of students who have access to our program, your donation also helps to broaden the power of our research, bringing us closer to the stage where we can spread this innovation to other settings.

Your chance to make a mark on education.

We continue to be a lean team doing this extraordinary work through our entirely tuition-funded school program. That means that your donation can have an immediate and concrete impact by helping us expand the reach of a program that has already developed a research-backed approach with proven, transformational effects. It won’t get lost in the bucket of large research institutions that are working on important foundational science but are still years away from bringing that work into the classroom.

Being a lean team on a tight budget, we make the most of every donation, and truly even a small donation makes a difference. In addition, we are looking for individuals and corporate sponsors who would be interested in supporting our work through a named scholarship, research chair position or other large gift increasing student access to our program and thus accelerating our innovation work.

Please make a donation to help support our work to modernize education to match modern neuroscience!

100% of our donations goes directly to supporting our kids. Here are examples of how much of a difference your donation can make:

One time donations:

$50 will provide adaptive seating for a child so they can focus their energies on their work

$200 will cover the supplies for a child to complete 3 project-based learning units

$1200 will cover a month of counseling sessions for a child's social-emotional needs

$7500 will cover a year of Neuroplasticity Interventions enhancing a skill that's holding a child back

Monthly donations:

$20 will provide a child's supplies for the community-wide sensory sessions that start each day

$50 will cover a child's curriculum costs for the year

$300 will provide a transportation scholarship for a child

$1000 will empower a child through work with our licensed therapists on how to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs

Contact us if you would like to volunteer your professional services to support our work!

Here are some of the volunteer positions we are hoping to fill - please help us spread the word if you know of someone who is looking for an opportunity to give back!

• Board members

• Fundraisers and Development Officers

• Bookkeepers or accountants (CPA) experienced with non-profit accounting

• Digital marketers and/or social media managers

• Graphic designers

• Pro bono nonprofit corporate governance and/or education law legal counsel

• Grant writing, or help to identify appropriate grant opportunities

• Software developers

We are interested in hearing from experienced educators and licensed therapists who share our passion and would like to be considered for positions as we grow our team. Please contact us to find out more.

Thank you!