Special education school moves to Westport

Viirand, a mother to two twice exceptional children, said she tried to find an applicable school for her children but when she came up empty, she started her own. She opened Cajal Academy in Fairfield in 2019.

“We realized that there has been this revolution in neuroscience in the last 20 or 30 years that hasn’t made it into the classroom yet,” Viirand said. “So there’s a lot of kids who are not thriving in mainstream environments, because those environments don’t align to the science of how kids learn.”

Viirand says the Cajal model is “totally new,” although pieces of it can be found elsewhere. She said there are two schools in New York City and a few in California that focus on twice exceptional students, but not really any in Connecticut or Westchester County.

There are currently 92 approved special education programs in Connecticut, according to Department of Education spokesman Eric Scoville. Cajal is not a state-approved school, but they are looking to get accredited, according to volunteer Cliff Van Voorhees.

Van Voorhees, who co-founded the Hyde Leadership Charter School in the South Bronx, said he has pitched in to help Viirand with the accreditation process in addition to some location scouting before the move.

“Anybody in Fairfield County or even probably all of Connecticut, as far as I know, who has a twice gifted child this is the ideal place for them,” Van Voorhees said. “Nothing else would touch it.”

Cajal is able to serve students in kindergarten through 12th grade. It only has students from sixth to 11th grade at the moment.

The new Westport site could help that number and range grow.

Viirand described their model as “aligning educational practices, general education practices and special education interventions to current neuroscientific understanding.” Part of this is the use of the body as a “learning modality and retraining modality,” she said.

She said one student who came to Cajal for middle school was “unable to read a paragraph independently.” After they found the underlying skill he needed to improve and worked on it, he was able to read 70 pages per week at full comprehension within six months, she said.

“What we’re seeing is that there are so, so many families who call us and say ‘I have this incredibly bright kid and when he was in kindergarten, first grade, he just adored school, and now he just comes home and he is completely shut down or he is crying every night because he feels like there’s no challenge for him at school,’” Viirand said.

The school originally resided in an office building in Fairfield, which Viirand said was a “wonderful place to start.” But the building is not configured for the school’s uses as well as Cajal needs it to be, Viirand said. The new building will be a closer commute for its students too.

Cajal has five students currently, hailing from Brooklyn, Darien and Westport. Viirand said they have received interest about attending Cajal in the future from families in Westport, Wilton, Greenwich, Redding and Ridgefield as well as New York. She said the school could reach up to 50 students within the next two to three years.

The new location offers the ability to expand over time, she said. They are starting out by renting 2,700 square feet of the over 31,000 square foot building.

“There is a lot of opportunity for us as we are scaling the cohort to keep adding additional space in a very organic way. And that’s incredibly valuable for us as a nonprofit startup organization,” Viirand said.

The location of the building on Sylvan Road also lends itself to incorporating more community interaction into the student’s curriculum, Viirand said. There is a brook behind the building that the school plans to do projects with. They also hope to engage with local businesses and work them into the curriculum too.

The move also gives the school the opportunity to open up its summer program on a “much larger scale,” she said. Cajal is currently taking applications for the summer program and for the 2022-23 school year.

Cajal is a tuition-based school with costs depending on what components are required to meet student needs. The school just introduced a new programming level at $47,500 per year and costs can go up to $89,000 per year or more, according to the school’s website. Viirand said most of the current student’s families have been able to secure district funding.