Hello, my name is Rebeca. I'm the mother of Luca. I'm here to tell his story. From preschool through second grade, my son attended Brook School Elementary, a public school. He was struggling every day. He is a brilliant kid and has ADHD, which was a terrible combination since he was smart enough to outsmart the system, but his ADHD made it hard for the school to handle him.

At that school, they wanted to label him as he had a delay; by first grade, he was already at a 4th-grade math level. His problem was reading. It was his undesirable task that he would always refuse to read. Soon enough, he learned that if he threw a tantrum when he had to read, he wouldn't have to do it anymore. Also, he began to realize that the bigger the tantrum, the less time he would have to spend at school and the more likely he would be sent home.

So this nightmare began, and it became a vicious cycle. He didn't want to read; he would throw a tantrum, he would be ashamed of it, and, not knowing what to do, get even more aggressive. The school would handle this by removing all the other children from the classroom (making the other kids afraid of him, therefore he had no friends), or the teachers put him in a padded closet (which was traumatic for him), either way, my poor 6-year-old was quickly learning that he was not good enough and how not to behave in school. And he wasn't learning how to read at all.

I was desperate; I had to quit my job to get him out of school whenever they didn't handle the situation, which was pretty much every day. I kept telling them that he needed to repeat second grade; he was too young for it. Also, if we could teach him that even if he threw tantrums, he would have to read, and if his reading level went up, he wouldn't be a problem anymore. They did everything wrong in this situation. I kept thinking that if they had a little more empathy, this wouldn't have happened in the first place. 

I started looking for other options and found the Apogee school, but, most importantly, Miss Jenny. At this time, I genuinely believed that this was going to be my future during my son's schooling years, just sadness for him and despair, and that I had failed as a parent, until I talked to Miss Jenny, who seemed confident that my son was not the problem, and for the first time in a school environment, he was perceived as a genius, not as defective. So I said "Go ahead," and, with the most significant leap of faith, Luca started school with Miss Jenny.

It was not an easy task. He came with all the learned misbehavior from the previous school. Miss Jenny quickly showed great empathy and patience, but, most importantly, discipline and a great deal of love. I don't know how she knew when to use what, but she managed that child with unbreakable kindness and consistency. She was not a teacher; she was a mentor. And she had a mission to get him to read.

Miss Jenny changed my kids' perception of everything. He was happier, and he began to be eager to go to school. He started making friends at school and became a bookworm. It was funny because this kid, who never wanted to read, now wanted more books. We even had to tell him he was not allowed to take books to bed because he wouldn't fall asleep. So he would sneak them into his bed at night, but he was so little and innocent that he would forget that he only knew how to read aloud. Lol.

​

She is not a teacher; she is a mentor. And anyone will be blessed to have her.