Franklin Academy has a distinctive mission and a very specific focus. As a result, we have attracted the largest population of students with Nonverbal Learning Differences and Asperger’s Syndrome of any school in the nation. We provide an incomparable 24/7 boarding school venue that is a prerequisite for improving social skills. Within our safe community, every student feels connected, understood, and supported. The academic program is especially designed for students who exhibit an auditory learning style preference, and the curriculum emphasizes mastery of skill sets that target important academic and life tasks. We deliberately structure the academic day, the weekends, and the school year to give our students the time they need to develop and practice important life skills while maintaining focus and coping with change.  Perhaps most importantly, our students identify with each other and enjoy the solidarity of belonging to a natural peer group.

The New England Association of Schools and Colleges commends Franklin Academy for creating an academic program and residential community that completely matches its mission. While we are proud of our school and the model program that we have created to serve students with NLD and Asperger’s, we are not complacent. A rigorous, on-going assessment of student performance parallels a continuing critique of curriculum, teaching strategies, and college admissions in a never-ending quest to serve our students more effectively.  As a consequence of our comprehensive self-study for accreditation, we forged an ambitious institutional action plan that we are now implementing.

Looking ahead to our seventh year of operation, we can state unequivocally that no other group of teachers has logged as many hours with NLD and Asperger’s students as the Franklin Academy faculty.  We currently employ a staff of forty-five professional educators to serve our eighty students. Teachers and students are organized by teams, each of which is headed by a learning specialist, a counselor, and a residential dean who work together to provide leadership for their team and oversight of the entire program for their students.  We developed this innovative collaborative leadership model to promote creativity and communication and to ensure that the academic, social/emotional, and life skill needs of each student are met in a truly holistic program.  The school invests significant time during the school year and over the summer for on-going professional development that builds on an ever-growing foundation of practical expertise.  An important consequence of the “give-and-take” among Franklin educators is continual innovation in program, teaching strategies, services, and interventions.

At times, our pursuit of the right answers for our students leads to the development of groundbreaking research projects. One such project is our current collaboration with the Rush Neurobehavioral Center (www.rnbc.org) – “an institution of excellence and cutting-edge knowledge dedicated to improving the quality of life for children with neurobehavioral issues with a special expertise on Nonverbal Learning Disabilities and other Social Emotional Learning Disorders.” The Franklin Academy/Rush project focuses on the social/emotional learning of students who have NLD and/or Asperger’s Syndrome. The purpose of this study is to increase our understanding of the social/emotional skill deficits typically displayed by our students and to determine how to help them improve their social interactions.

This research began as a pilot project in September of 2008, using Franklin Academy’s younger female students. Given that the Rush Neurobehavioral Center provided start-up funding for this pilot project, supplemented by a small subsidy from Franklin Academy’s operating budget, the assessment phase has been completed and the intervention phase is beginning. Now, Franklin Academy has secured important financial support from the Esther B. Kahn Charitable Foundation for this project, allowing our research to move ahead.

We believe the design of this pilot program will provide us with vital information about the nature of our students’ social/emotional learning deficits and identify effective interventions to improve their skills in these important areas. Simply having diagnostic information and efficacy outcomes organized in a systematic framework allows us to be more focused, thoughtful, and efficient in our efforts to help students with NLD and Asperger’s. Specific indicators of success include:

• A diagnostic profile for each student participating in the study.
• Development of a more concise and precise diagnostic assessment battery.
• Statistically significant improvement in student skill development both at the individual level and the aggregate as a result of the interventions.
• Development of an intervention series for students with NLD or Asperger’s that will successfully address deficits in social/emotional learning skills.

In addition to the current project with Rush, a number of Franklin Academy families are working with the Simons Simplex Research Team at the Yale Child Study Center. We have collaborated with Boston University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on smaller research projects, and we envision a growing range of research opportunities to take advantage of Franklin Academy's institutional mission, the considerable expertise of our professional educators, and the critical mass of wonderful students who want to fulfill their potential.