Orion Academy | |
---|---|
Location | |
United States | |
Coordinates | 37°58′25″N122°02′08″W / 37.9734992°N 122.0356658°W |
Information | |
Type | High School |
Established | 2000 |
Founder | Kathryn Stewart |
Grades | 9-12 |
Color(s) | Blue |
Website | www |
Orion Academy [1] is a private high school in Concord, California, United States, for students with autism, nonverbal learning disorder (NLD), and other neurocognitive disabilities. It offers a special education college preparatory program for grades 9-12.
The school maintains a staff-to-student ratio of 1:4 with an average class size of eight. Over 90% of its graduates attend college or post-secondary training. [1] In 2010, there were 80 students enrolled in total. [2] In 2017, there were 44 currently enrolled students.
Orion Academy is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), [3] has a 180-day curriculum, and is approved as a nonpublic school [4] by the State of California.
Kathryn Stewart is Orion Academy's Executive Director. [5] In 1988, Sue Thompson, Judy Lewis, and, all involved with nonverbal learning disorder,[ clarification needed ] met with Stewart to ask her to set up a school for students with NLD or Asperger's syndrome. They introduced Stewart to Aaron and Val Simon, parents of a child with Asperger's syndrome who were interested in funding a school. With funding from the Simons, after two years of planning meetings, Orion Academy welcomed its first eight students taught by four teachers in September 2000. By June 2001, there were twelve students. [6]
In 2022, Orion Academy relocated from Moraga, California to its current location in Concord.
Orion Academy has teachers in language arts, math, science, special education, social science, and social skills. [7]
More than 35 college preparatory courses are offered to approximately 60 students with a staff including 20 professionals in total. Extracurricular activities include chess club, student council, a travel program, and a track team. Orion-specific activities include the Dog Program, a mandatory personal project class, social skills groups, laptop computers as a basis of all work done by students, mandated volunteer experiences, and internship opportunities. [6]
Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's syndrome, formerly described a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. The syndrome has been merged with other disorders into autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and is no longer considered a stand-alone diagnosis. It was considered milder than other diagnoses that were merged into ASD due to relatively unimpaired spoken language and intelligence.
Moraga is a town in Contra Costa County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The town is named in honor of Joaquín Moraga, member of the famed Californio family. As of 2020, Moraga had a total population of 16,870 people. Moraga is the home of Saint Mary's College of California.
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Nonverbal learning disability (NVLD) is a proposed category of neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by core deficits in visual-spatial processing and a significant discrepancy between verbal and nonverbal intelligence. A review of papers found that proposed diagnostic criteria were inconsistent. Proposed additional diagnostic criteria include intact verbal intelligence, and deficits in the following: visuoconstruction abilities, speech prosody, fine motor coordination, mathematical reasoning, visuospatial memory and social skills. NVLD is not recognised by the DSM-5 and is not clinically distinct from learning disorder.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to autism:
Dyssemia is a difficulty with receptive and/or expressive nonverbal communication. The word comes from the Greek roots dys (difficulty) and semia (signal). The term was coined by psychologists Marshall Duke and Stephen Nowicki in their 1992 book, Helping The Child Who Doesn't Fit In, to decipher the hidden dimensions of social rejection. These difficulties go beyond problems with body language and motor skills. Dyssemic persons exhibit difficulties with the acquisition and use of nonverbal cues in interpersonal relationships. "A classic set of studies by Albert Mehrabian showed that in face-to-face interactions, 55 percent of the emotional meaning of a message is expressed through facial, postural, and gestural means, and 38 percent of the emotional meaning is transmitted through the tone of voice. Only seven percent of the emotional meaning is actually expressed with words." Dyssemia represents the social dysfunction aspect of nonverbal learning disorder.
Neurodevelopmental disorders are a group of conditions that begin to emerge during childhood. According to the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, (DSM-5) published in 2013, these conditions generally appear in early childhood, usually before children start school, and can persist into adulthood. The key characteristic of all these disorders is that they negatively impact a person's functioning in one or more domains of life depending on the disorder and deficits it has caused. All of these disorders and their levels of impairment exist on a spectrum, and affected individuals can experience varying degrees of symptoms and deficits, despite having the same diagnosis.
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Hampshire Country School (HCS) is a private boarding school for gifted children in Rindge, New Hampshire, United States, founded by Henry Curtis Patey and Adelaide Walker Patey in 1948. Formerly a co-educational school, it is now a boarding school for boys between 8 and 17 years who have difficulty in other settings. The majority of the students are enrolled in grades 6 through 9.
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Asperger syndrome (AS) was formerly a separate diagnosis under autism spectrum disorder. Under the DSM-5 and ICD-11, patients formerly diagnosable with Asperger syndrome are diagnosable with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The term is considered offensive by some autistic individuals. It was named after Hans Asperger (1906–80), who was an Austrian psychiatrist and pediatrician. An English psychiatrist, Lorna Wing, popularized the term "Asperger's syndrome" in a 1981 publication; the first book in English on Asperger syndrome was written by Uta Frith in 1991 and the condition was subsequently recognized in formal diagnostic manuals later in the 1990s.
Brehm Preparatory School is a not-for-profit 501 (c)(3) co-educational college preparatory day and boarding school for students with learning disabilities, founded in 1982. Brehm Preparatory School is located in Carbondale, Illinois. The school enrolls students in grades 6-12+. The average class size is eight in core content classes and 5 in learning cognition classes. Brehm's student-teacher ratio is 6:1.
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Kathryn Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for high-functioning kids in Moraga, California, calls Asperger's syndrome "the engineers' disorder."