Viirand, a mother of two twice exceptional children, said she had tried to find a suitable school for her children, but when it found itself empty, she opened her own. She opened the Cajal Academy in Fairfield in 2019.

“We realized there’s been this revolution in neuroscience over the last 20 or 30 years that hasn’t hit the classroom yet,” Viirand said. “So there are a lot of kids who don’t thrive in traditional environments because those environments don’t align with 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 were two schools in New York and a few in California that focused on twice outstanding students, but not really 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-accredited school, but they are seeking accreditation, according to volunteer Cliff Van Voorhees.

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

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

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

Westport’s new site could help increase that number and range.

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

She said a student who came to Cajal for middle school was “unable to read a paragraph independently.” After finding the underlying skill he needed to improve and working on it, he was able to read 70 pages a week with full understanding in six months, she said.

“What we’re seeing is there are so, so many families calling us up and saying, ‘I have this incredibly bright kid and when he was in kindergarten, first grade, he loved school. , and now he comes home and he’s completely shut down or he cries every night because he feels like there’s no challenge for him in 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 school uses as well as Cajal needs, Viirand said. The new building will also be a closer commute for its students.

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

The new location provides the opportunity to expand over time, she said. They start by renting 2,700 square feet of the 31,000+ square foot building.

“There are a lot of opportunities for us as we grow the cohort to continue to add additional space in a very organic way. And that’s incredibly valuable to us as a nonprofit startup organization” , said Viirand.

The building’s location on Sylvan Road also lends itself to incorporating greater community interaction into the student’s curriculum, Viirand said. There is a creek behind the building that the school plans to make plans with. They also hope to engage with local businesses and bring them into the program as well.

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

Cajal is a tuition-based school with costs dependent on the components needed to meet student needs. The school just introduced a new level of programming 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 families of current students have been able to secure funding from the district.

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