Nisha Sharma would like to study medicine at university. But, until recently, she was having a hard time just finishing high school. Then the principal at her former school recommended Nisha enrol in Pinehurst School in St. Catharines, Ontario, a private boarding school that helps students who are not motivated within a traditional classroom environment to succeed.

“A lot of us are here because of a habit or something else that was keeping us from doing our best,” says Nisha, a Grade 12 student last year at Pinehurst. “This school really helps you focus and think about your future, and how you want your life to be.”

Pinehurst has small classes and a rigid schedule to engage students and accommodate learning difficulties. “We see students who have gone off the rails and come to us at the end of their line,” says principal Dave Bird. “And, most of them realize that if they bear down, they can turn their grades around, get back on track and graduate successfully.”

Nisha says she dropped out of an advanced functions course after just three weeks at her prior school. “Here, I’m taking the same course, but because of the way my teachers explain things, it was easy for me to understand and to move along independently,” she says. “Now, I’m getting five credits this semester and need only two more to graduate.”

— Hailey Eisen

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Greg and Leslie Tayler watched their son, proudly, from the audience. Two years ago, they never would have imagined themselves here, listening to the 12-year-old give a speech in front of his class about hockey icon Wayne Gretzky. Back then, his language-based learning disability was a huge roadblock, affecting his grades, his social relationships and his confidence. But that was before they found Wildwood Academy in Oakville, Ontario.

When the Taylers started to look around at schools that could best accommodate their son, they were struck by how public schools had been impacted by budget cuts. The moment their educational consultant brought them to Wildwood Academy, however, they knew they had found the right school.

Now he’s thriving, playing in the hockey and golf clubs, and learning the guitar. After school, his teachers help him with homework.
“It frees him up for family-oriented evenings during the week and eliminates the strain on our family,” say his proud parents.

“Mom and Dad no longer need to play the role of tutor.”

— Megan Griffith-Greene

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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.”

— Heather Greenwood Davis

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Call them 10 lost years. When Thomas arrived at Landmark East School in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, at that age, he could neither spell nor put together a sentence. His schooling in England had been an experience in frustration. He was seven before it was discovered he was dyslexic. The solution, he recalled, “was to put me in special ed classes to do drills.”

When his parents—his father is Canadian—heard about Landmark East, a school specializing in kids with learning disabilities, they moved to Wolfville and enrolled their son.
“I was very hopeful,” says Thomas, now 17. “In the first two days alone, my progress was absolutely incredible. Everything was so positive.” He chummed with another boy his age with similar learning problems, “and we both excelled at our studies.” The key, says Thomas, was learning how to learn. “They teach you different ways to learn. And I began to understand that this was not something that was going to hold me back.”

His social life in England had been “horrible.” In Wolfville, he learned how to communicate, and blossomed.

Through school cadets, he got his private pilot’s license and this summer learned he had been accepted at flight college in New Brunswick. His plan: to become a commercial pilot. His greatest joy? “It’s the freedom—going from someone who couldn’t write a sentence to someone who can fly a plane.”

—Frank Jones