Cajal Academy is proud to offer a 1st-of-its-kind program empowering students who have complex medical conditions through strategies, interventions and coaching to help them learn how to manage their own medical conditions within educational and occupational settings. This includes diagnoses such as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, other connective tissue disorders, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic fatigue syndrome, hypermobility syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome and more.

Our program combines highly-personalized academic programs in which students collaborate together with their peers to solve real world problems on the one hand, and expert therapies and coaching in how to independently manage the complicated and changing impacts of each student’s medical conditions on the other. Our academic programs are designed to give these kids the exciting and purposeful learning that is tailored to their academic and social-emotional needs. Because we know first hand that growing up with chronic medical conditions is hard enough, and kids shouldn’t have to do it alone.

We are committed to fostering our students’ identities as scholars, athletes and future thought-leaders—not “patients.”

Our academic program is an important part of our commitment to supporting children who have complex medical needs not as “patients” but as scholars, athletes, artists and future thought leaders. As a former litigator with a top 5 U.S. law firm, our Head of School models for the children that having complex medical needs like the ones that Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome can create doesn’t have to stand in the way of going to a competitive college or graduate school, or from achieving your dreams. We are passionate that no student should have to choose between intellectually-stimulating academic programs to prepare them for the futures of their choice and the therapeutic supports they need to learn how to thrive independently once they get there—whatever challenges their bodies may throw their way.

Here are some of the components that go into our approach:

School is about more than learning to read and write, it’s about learning how to excel as a human. For kids with complex medical profiles or atypical neurological development, this is even more salient—and it requires a higher level of expertise. For students in our Zebra Program, our goal is to develop self-management strategies and educational supports to help each child minimize the impact of their medical conditions on their learning, social and emotional experiences to the extent possible, giving them agency over their life-lived experiences. This is a multi-pronged, comprehensive approach implemented through deep collaboration across our academic and clinical teams, in conjunction with the child’s family and medical experts. Here is a look at the several inter-related pieces and how they fit together.

We bring our students’ personalized strategies out of the OT gym and embed them directly into academic instruction itself, through our exclusive, OT-designed “Body-Informed Learning.” This unique pedagogy uses movement, rhythm and games, personalized to each child’s physio profile, to deliver academic content. Bringing these strategies directly into instruction reduces the need to take breaks for re-regulation, leverages the body as a powerful learning modality, and models for our medically-complex students strategies that they can employ themselves to care for their bodies while enhancing their learning, rather than letting their body needs stand in the way.

This kinesthetic pedagogical approach is supported by recent findings in the area of “embodied cognition,” that when we pair learning activities with motor and sensory input, we deepen children’s engagement and retention of the material. This can be particularly powerful for children who have inefficient neurovascular systems, sensory processing disorder, chronic muscle cramping and fatigue and similar medical challenges. For these children, regular and strategically-designed neurovascular stimulation can dramatically increase cognitive availability through increased cerebral blood flow, reduced pain, neurochemical re-regulation and more.

We bring this same expertise into all of our physical education instruction as well. Each morning starts with a “body wakeup” taught by our OT & PT staff, preparing their bodies and minds for the day while integrating instruction in how to read and address variable body needs. Our physio experts also teach our gym class, providing adaptive sports and real-time, expert modifications to manage physio differences and address therapeutic needs. This increases the amount of direct physical and occupational therapy services our students receive, without the social isolation or academic disruption of ‘pull out’ therapeutic services.

All of these physio, social-emotional and academic elements come together through our trauma-informed behavioral approach. Drawing on our team’s deep knowledge of both learning differences and the connections between children’s hidden neurophysiological events and their social, emotional and learning experiences, we appreciate that children’s behaviors are really just manifestations of the problems they need our help to solve. Rather than a consequentialist approach, we respond to these behaviors by partnering with the child in the moment to help them return to feeling safe and supported, and then to identify together the physical sensations, emotional triggers, academic anxieties and other internal events that had immediately preceded their dysregulation.

This approach is important to meeting the needs of kids with complex medical conditions, for whom the symptoms themselves may act as recurring traumas, even without the added trauma of conditions that progressively increase over time. This is additionally critical for children with connective tissue disorders and other chronic conditions in which the central nervous system becomes overloaded by the panoply of physiologically- (as opposed to psychologically-) driven somatosensory inputs. Recent research with the Ehlers-Danlos population indicates that this constant barrage of neurological signals disrupts the physiological state of homeostasis, throwing the child into a physiologically-driven survival mode, triggering the “freeze, fight or flight” reaction that is also common in trauma. Similar effects can occur with mast cell activation syndrome, due to the interactions between MCAS-driven neurochemical releases, the functioning of the nervous system and, some research indicates, even focal inflammatory responses within the brain itself.

Needless to say, each of these physiological chain reactions can greatly impact a child’s behavior, and yet none of them is “behavioral” in nature. ABA or consequentialist systems are insufficient and can in fact be harmful for these kids, as the relevant triggering events are by definition hidden, and the behaviors are physiologically- rather than consciously controlled. Systems relying on ‘carrots and sticks’ to encourage the child to control these behaviors serve only to increase shame over their differences, while failing to neurologically prepare them to better control the outcomes in the future.

More to the point, when we do understand the biological events driving these behaviors, it is possible to teach children strategies they can use to interrupt those processes, replacing shame with a feeling of agency and empowerment. To do this, we work with each child individually to help them understand these internal chain reactions at an age-appropriate level, and then when responding to behavioral outbursts we model for them a process of monitoring for physiological “tells” or triggers they may have experienced right before. Together, we help them to identify the physical “reactions” that ensued internally, and then to distinguish those reactions from their consciously-controlled “responses” thereto. Over time, children learn that they have a “moment of choice” to choose a more socially-acceptable response, become more adept at predicting and avoiding triggers proactively, and gain increasing agency over the autonomic reactions themselves, through their personalized self-regulation strategies.

Admissions Criteria

Our Zebra Program is designed as a fluid school within a school. All Zebra Program students are fully-integrated academically and socially with the other students in our program, and our grouped together where there are opportunities to build their sense of kinship and support through, for example, specialized social groups or OT & PT sessions to address hypermobility or other specialized conditions.

As a result, Zebra Program applicants must meet our broader admissions criteria. Specifically, all applicants to our program have verbal reasoning skills in the “very high” to “superior” range. This is important for accessing our curriculum, which relies heavily on recruiting our students’ analytical reasoning skills to give them agency over their medical and life-lived experiences. Cajal Academy is the only special education school in Connecticut or in Westchester County, NY that is specifically-designed to meet the needs of twice exceptional kids, however we do not rely on full scale IQ or prior identification as ‘gifted’ in our admissions criteria.

Cajal Academy does not make medical diagnoses. However, students having either formal diagnoses or common manifestations of connective tissue disorders, dysautonomia/POTS, mast cell activation syndrome, joint hypermobility, chronic pain or fatigue, sleep disturbance and/or other complex medical profiles will be enrolled automatically in our Zebra Program, to ensure that they receive the proper educational supports. All applicants should note these and other areas of specific need or concern on our application, and discuss them during our admissions process. Please don’t be shy about this: we specifically designed Cajal Academy to meet the needs of kids who are “complicated” and want to be sure we understand your child’s programming needs!