One home, where a child’s program can adapt as their needs change—so their community doesn’t have to.

We believe strongly in the educational value of diversity, and we’ve seen first hand how it gives perspective when they learn alongside kids who have different passions, challenges and “superpowers” to bring to the table.

As a tuition-funded non-profit, we facilitate this through a range of programming levels and approaches, depending on the child’s profile and the resources required to address the challenges holding them back. Regardless of programming level, profile or even ages, all our students understand themselves as being a part of a unified community, with a shared purpose and culture, contributing together to a community-wide project-based learning endeavor.

Programming Levels and Tuition

Each student’s program is customized through our Cajal Profile Analysis process. It is important to note that our goal is not just to cram in more curriculum despite the child’s profile, but rather to identify and address the challenges—whatever they may be—that interfere with your child’s ability to thrive in more mainstream settings.

Core Program Level

Students who do not have learning, social, emotional or neurophysio differences that interfere with their access to academic or social activities, and therefore not requiring a customized program or services beyond those that are integrated into the environment for all students will be offered the opportunity to enroll at our Core Program Level. This level offers all the benefits of our project based learning curriculum, small class sizes, close teacher relationships and Body-Informed Learning.

For all those students who do have areas of academic, social-emotional or physio needs (whether or not they may have an IEP), our team will create a custom program tailored to address the specific challenges identified during the admissions process. Because of the success of our program, many students have initially enrolled at Cajal with fairly substantial programs (and accordingly high tuition levels) but have seen their child’s needs dramatically reduce over the course of as a school year, resulting in declining tuition rates for each successive year. That is the purpose of our program!

We created our Core Program Level to offer our families an alternative, priced equivalent to mainstream private schools in our community, that would allow intellectually gifted kids the opportunity to access our standards-based project based learning, small class sizes, close teacher relationships, Body-Informed Learning and coaching to prepare our college-bound students to manage their physio and social-emotional needs in an independent environment. Students who initially enroll at Cajal at higher tuition levels will “migrate towards” this programming level as their needs are addressed.

Custom Program Levels

For students who do have learning, social, emotional or neurophysio differences interfering with their access to academic or social activities, which our team believes would require customization beyond what is integrated in our Core Program Level, we will create a custom program based on one of our four custom program levels (Learning Interventions, Complex Educational Profiles, Journeys and Medically Complex Profiles). The clinical understandings & supports are integrated into all aspects of the program, curriculum design, scheduling approaches  & the classroom, and the type & quantity of services shifts over time as the child’s profile evolves: decisions and adjustments that are made seamlessly by our team.

Tuitions are set accordingly, and reflect the level of complexity of the student’s profile, proportion of our clinicians’ time, the extent to which 1:1 instruction may be required (either due to the uniqueness of the learning profile or due to social-emotional challenges) and other factors impacting our capacity to accept additional children into the program at this time that we are scaling our student body. This is fundamentally different from the way public schools (and many private schools) deliver and contract their services; it is not possible for Cajal to provide a breakdown of our tuition levels on an hourly basis. This assessment starts through our admissions process; should there be a significant discrepancy between your child’s presentation at school and the materials provided to us during the admissions process, a tuition adjustment may be required.

Please use the links below to learn more about our four custom program levels, or scroll down to read sample programs for common profiles within the community that we serve. We have provided tuition ranges to give a sense of the scale and criteria of our tuition levels, however as noted above each student’s program is customized within those programming tiers, based on the complexity and intensity of the programming needs.

No child should have to choose between academic challenge and the support they need to thrive.

All Cajal Academy programs integrate both stimulating academic programs and highly-personalized individual growth plans that leverage neuroplasticity to build up the skills they need to overcome any weaknesses in their otherwise strong neuropsychological and neurophysio profiles. Find out more about these core elements of our program below.

was founded on the premise that children can only fulfill their full human potential when they are given the opportunity to discover and experience their own gifts—and that this shouldn’t come at the cost of the expertise and support they need to overcome obstacles and have agency over their own life-lived experiences. Achieving this balance is especially important (and challenging!) for children having complex learning, social, sensory and/or neurological profiles. Our program is specifically-designed to meet these students’ needs, while leveraging modern neuroscientific research to address—not just accommodate—their differences, enabling them to thrive independently in the academic, social and professional settings of their own choosing.

Across the country, very few schools integrate academic programming appropriate to kids with very high cognitive profiles with specialized instruction, diagnostic and therapeutic services and expertise. Our program was designed by a social entrepreneur who is a generalist problem solver and “mom” to two kids in this unique cohort, together with an expert, multi-disciplinary team of experienced educators, licensed therapists and a recognized neuropsychologist. Together, they have developed an innovative program that leverages new neuroscientific research and understandings to identify and address the challenges holding kids back—not just accommodate them.

As the number of families we serve grows, we are making connections that don’t appear in the literature—and that have led to specialized programs for kids having certain archetypal profiles. We will always include students in our cohort whose profiles are unique enough to require their own mix, but the links below will give you an idea of the mix of strategies we integrate into each child’s program to effectuate transformational growth.

Here are some of the specialized programs we have developed thus far:

Cajal Academy is an avowedly inclusive community, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical disability or any other protected class.