Our Lower School offers a small and supportive learning environment designed to meet each student’s individual academic and social-emotional needs. Students benefit from a 5:1:1 student-to-teacher ratio and students are supported by a Special Education Teacher and a Teaching Assistant. This configuration provides students with highly personalized instruction throughout the day. The Lower School academic program emphasizes differentiated instruction and uses the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt “Into Reading and Into Math” curricula to ensure students receive robust, research-based instruction aligned to individual skill levels. Students are also instructed on targeted learning strategies grounded in the Response-to-Intervention model as well as multisensory reading instruction methods based on the Orton-Gillingham approach.
In addition to robust academics, the Lower School integrates executive functioning support and social-emotional learning through our proprietary Clinically Informed Academics® approach. The Heroes Journey™ narrative model is infused, so students learn to see themselves as resilient learners. Our students connect daily with mentors, teachers, and clinical staff to acquire and maintain competencies that lead to academic and social-emotional growth. Our program structure supports our students so they can master critical skills such as organization, planning, judgment, self-regulation, and social cooperation.
Our Lower School is a supportive setting where our students feel included and benefit from our unique model while also enjoying a variety of prosocial student life activities:
- Honors Society
- Heroes Council
- Mentor Program
- Clubs
- Expressive Arts
- Kudos
The Lower School is intentionally designed around a small student to teacher ratio to foster a deep sense of connection and belonging, where students build meaningful relationships while building academic proficiency, so they can perform adeptly in middle school. This close-knit community ensures that every child is known, supported, and celebrated as they grow academically, socially, and emotionally.