Last Christmas was a watershed moment for 10-year-old Dean. After four years of trying, he learned to tell time. "I had been trying to teach him since he was six. It was an incredible moment when it finally clicked for him," says Dean's mother Tracey Van Herpe.
Many things that had frustrated Dean for years started to fall into place after he began attending Arrowsmith School in Toronto. Dean has dyslexia, and reading and writing had been a torturous process since he started school. "Homework took him hours. It was a really emotional time for us. He just wasn't learning in a traditional setting," Tracey says.
So the mother of three, from London, Ontario, took the dramatic step of moving to Toronto with Dean so he could attend Arrowsmith, which focuses on students with learning disabilities. "Arrowsmith's program isolated Dean's areas of weakness and focused on them intensively. They did testing constantly and they provided monthly reports," Tracey says. By the end of his first year, Dean had progressed so much he earned the school's Principal Award. "I almost cried. He has just excelled. He is a completely different child."
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