From the
Our Kids site (Canadian). Rocklyn no longer maintains a profile on their site; maybe it was too pricey given their current low enrollment numbers...
I think this article was first published in 2003 or 2004, as it mentions that the school was (then) founded four years ago.
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Our Kids Go To SchoolBack to their futureSpecialized schools help struggling kids triumphIt seemed like it happened overnight. Becky Kamm morphed from model child to teenager from hell. She became defiant and unco-operative; she stayed out all night drinking and partying; she skipped school and thumbed her nose at parental rules.
"It was like a war zone," says her mother, Jo-Dee Kamm, who manages a court office in Dryden, Ontario. "She defied anything we set down - what time to be home, helping at home - yet she wanted all the privileges. She was spiraling out of control. We were terrified she was going to get hurt."
It started with her summer job. Several lakeside tourist resorts near Dryden rely on seasonal employment. Becky worked as a waitress and cabin cleaner, and quickly fell in with the wrong crowd.
"It was like she was giving up," Kamm says. "Her marks were dropping. She wasn't focused. And she was hanging out with a crowd whose only interest was drugs and alcohol. At one point, she came home and I realized, this is not my daughter. I don't know this person. It's like somebody threw the switch on this kid - and she blamed us."
The turning point came one day, when Becky, struggling with her poor marks, found herself hesitating as her friends tried to persuade her to skip class once again. She gave in - again. That night in her room she began to worry about the future.
"I was afraid I was going to end up a nobody and that was my worst fear - to be a failure," Becky says.
Her mother found her, curled up and crying.
"I said to her, 'Help me understand what you need. I don't know how to help you any more.' "
Becky told her mother that she had to get away, that she could not make it if she stayed. She mentioned a school that a friend of hers had attended.
Within three weeks, she was on a plane to Rocklyn Academy near Owen Sound, Ontario on Georgian Bay. Set on 75 forested acres with five kilometres of walking trails, it's a small private boarding school for troubled - and troublesome - high school girls who are doing poorly in the traditional school setting because they are hard to manage or truant or in crisis.
"My mom said, 'Once you are on that plane, there is no turning back,' " Becky recalls. "I knew that if I got on that plane I had to be prepared to do what I had to do. After that I didn't know what would happen. I thought my grades were too bad to get into university."
Idyllic as the country setting was, Becky at first lashed out, railing against her parents for "sending" her there. But her mother reminded her, "No, remember this is what you wanted and we are supporting you."
In the ensuing months, a dramatic change took place.
Becky's attitude changed. She threw herself into kick-boxing, soccer, weight training and yoga. Her marks went up. "Now if I get an 80, I'm disappointed," she says.
She worked her way up through the school ranks to "head girl." And her dreams of becoming a vet, dreams long given up, are back on track. Now an A student, she has been accepted at four universities and has chosen the University of Guelph, where she has a $1,000 scholarship.
"It feels like my daughter is back," says Kamm.
Bob Shaw, a teacher who founded Rocklyn Academy four years ago with his psychotherapist wife Dale Stohn, puts it simply. "We help them rediscover their excellence. All we do is help them find that which is within them."
It's an approach that grew out of week-long emotional healing retreats Shaw and Stohn used to conduct for teens to deal with issues like anger management. It's very structured with lots of rules and 24-hour, seven-day-a-week supervision, but staff are nurturing, Shaw says, and "it's not a boot camp."
The girls make their own decisions, but they also deal with the consequences. If they are caught smoking, for instance, they lose privileges for a week. Although the consequences meet a lot of resistance, the girls eventually move through five levels of "responsibilities and privileges" beginning with "incoming student" culminating, for some, with head girl. Along the way they acquire privileges such as more phone calls, allowable items of jewelry and weekend leaves, earned or revoked according to behaviour.
It may seem arbitrary, Shaw says, but it's symbolic. The privileges are not important - it's what they represent. "They need to feel that they are in charge of their lives," Shaw says, "and making those choices is the birth of self-esteem."
The school doesn't take students with psychiatric disorders ; it's not a treatment centre.
There are 26 staff for 27 girls, many of whom have attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the low self-esteem that often ensues. Most of the girls are intelligent but do not believe they are.
And the girl must want to come to Rocklyn Academy. "We're not a lockup," Shaw adds with a chuckle. "We work with them in ways that include a phenomenal amount of tolerance."
Dramatic results, as in Becky's case, are why more and more parents are making often huge personal and financial sacrifices to send their kids to special needs private schools.
"I have parents who have mortgaged the house and grandparents who have cashed in their RSPs," says Scott Morrison, headmaster of the Sheila Morrison School in a rural setting near Barrie, Ontario.
Fees here range from $14,000 for a day student to $26,500 for a boarder. Rocklyn Academy's fees are $35,000, and all students are boarders.
"We have kids who come to us at 16 who can't read," says Morrison. If they do not get help, he adds, "you end up with a 19-year-old who has no skills but they don't know they have no skills because they are getting Bs. No one ever fails them. They are being misled. You have kids in Grade 7 who still have not mastered work at the Grade 3 level and this builds on itself."
Morrison blames the whole language system, which he calls the most disastrous thing in the world for children with learning disabilities. Introduced in the late 1960s, it bypasses spelling and language structure in favour of memorizing or "guess work," he says.
"Kids with learning disabilities who were once considered lazy or slow learners must be taught to decode words phonetically," he says.
"We have kids who have come up five grades in one year. If you saw the progress, you would not think it's the same kids."
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