Can you guess how far families have moved in order to bring their child to Noble? Listen to this episode to check your answer, and find out why many families have gone to great lengths for their child to have a Noble moving experience.
Come back next week for part 2 of a A Noble Moving Experience to hear a powerful story of friendship formed by parents who share the connection of having moved to Greensboro in order to help a child with a learning disability attend Noble Academy.
GAYLE:
Did you know that about 80% of parents who choose an independent school for students with learning differences learn about the school they choose from a Google search? That surprised me. Here is something else I found absolutely stunning: While Noble Academy is always trying to reach and support families in the local Greensboro area, we also have had families relocate from far and wide after discovering our website, then touring, then realizing that no place could do a better job of meeting their child’s needs.
Today you are going to hear from just two families of many families who couldn’t find anything like Noble to support their kids where they were, so they picked up and moved here, and it was a great decision.
Angela:
I'm Angela, and I have a middle-schooler. This is our 1st year at Noble.
I think it was about 3 years ago, maybe 2 years ago, we did a tour of schools for dyslexic learners that are in the Southeast. So we had already toured 3, maybe 4 schools and had ruled those out and stayed in Georgia. And we ruled them out for reasons that were just personal to us. So fast forward 2 more years and, yeah, we need to look again. So we looked at 3 or 4 more schools in the southeast, and we found all of those schools just by doing Internet searches.
You hear early on in your child's dyslexic journey or in their learning differences journey that it's really difficult to find a school that's the right fit. And I was always sort of dismissive of that. I always thought, oh, it'll be easy to find a school that's the right fit. That story that you hear often is really true. I think it is very difficult to find the school that you feel is just right for your child that checks all of the boxes that are important to your family and your child's learning style, your child's learning differences, your child's gifts, and that's really important.
So we did our second tour of schools in the southeast, looked at 3 or 4, and we knew when we left Noble that Noble would be it.
I remember when we went into a science classroom, the teacher asked one of the students to tell us what the class was working on.
And that spoke to my heart so much that the child was given the ability to do that and the opportunity to do that. And then I remember we went into a social studies class that was so dynamic and so interesting that my husband and I both said we wished we'd had that teacher when we were in middle school. And then we went into the library where they had the 3 maker rooms, and our son is all about building. He's all about: How does it work? He's all about taking it apart and putting it together.
He is interested in audio visual. He's interested in how computers work. And when we saw those 3 maker rooms, and more importantly, when he saw those 3 maker rooms, we were done.
We love the school. We love Noble. I keep waiting for there to be a problem, and there hasn't been one. It almost makes me nervous, but I'm settling into, “Yes, it's really as good as I think it is.” And, do you have time for a quick story about that?
Okay. So my son was given homework detention recently. And when I heard about this, I thought, well, first I thought, what did we miss? But that really wasn't important. What I really was worried about was him being embarrassed.
And I said, “So tell me about your teacher. What did it sound like? Was he mad? Was he frustrated with you?” He said, “Oh, no. Nothing like that. He just showed me what I hadn't done. He showed me how to do it, and then he said, you'll just get it done after school.”
And he said, “I liked homework detention!” So that made my heart so, so happy. It made me happy that he was treated with respect and kindness.
I'm proud to be noble because I feel like my son is in an environment that respects children, and that is so very, very important to me. And at the same time, is helping him to grow. It's challenging him.
And I feel like he is safe here physically and emotionally. And he's learning to use his voice.
He has made tons of friends. He has a core group that he talks about a lot, and then he has many more outside of that that he talks about with regularity. He's happy.
He just came back from the school trip, and he told me that his new friends here, it feels like he's known them for years. That made the whole thing worthwhile. That made the whole move. Just that one sentence made the move worthwhile.
ADELLE:
So prior to coming to Noble, Nicholas was struggling in pretty much every aspect other than the social aspect at school. He loved going to school and being with his friends. At the time, we were living in Australia and we were struggling living in an educational system that did not cater to individual differences. So his individual differences in terms of ADHD weren't respected or considered. His individual differences in terms of his significant difficulty with reading, his significant difficulties with phonics was just a repeated concern over and over again and we get to the point in 5th grade where we have this completely stressed out little fella who at home was bright, articulate, curious about the world, and was just getting, more and more debilitated at school and blaming himself for a bunch of problems that weren't his alone to solve, if that makes any sense.
So, we discovered Noble, after traveling to the States, on a work related trip, I got a second opinion from people at Duke about Nicholas's situation. And I asked them straight up, if this is your son living here in America, what would be a pathway forward for him in terms of education? And they were very quick to talk about schools like, the Hill Center in Durham. And so I followed up with the Hill Center and followed a path that led, to Noble from there. And Noble certainly presented a much more attractive package for us in terms of Nicholas because it's a whole day experience. Coming from another country was enough of a move for him. Trying to get him into a school in the morning and then transferring over to a school like the Hill Center in the afternoon just would not have worked, for Nicholas instead of a whole other layer of complexity that we didn't need. But at least those conversations led us to discover somewhere like Noble kind of by accident but kind of not. And then I was able to follow-up on some employment opportunities here and so, yeah, one thing kind of led to the other. But certainly, after I did my tour at Noble, I remember calling my husband back in Australia in tears saying, you know, I have found it. It was like going to Disneyland. I remember saying that to him, this is it. This is where we need to be.
And this was like in March and I'm like, we need to be here in August. He needs to start here in August. And my husband was like, okay. That started all the to do lists and everything else that actually got us here. So I just wanted to start.
The thing that really struck me in our first tour of Noble was the fact that the things that I've been reading about, so all of what the research told me should be in a school environment, was there. So I was watching small groups of students interact very closely with a teacher who was making differences in how they were approaching the material to suit individual students in that class and I was seeing that happen. I was seeing teachers hit the pause button because the class needed a bit of a movement break and seeing the kids kind of go down the hallway and run out the back door into the field to have a run around. So, all the things that I knew from my you know as a parent trying to understand ADHD in particular I was seeing that in place somewhere that it wasn't rocket science you could actually design curriculum you could teach teachers how to do this and I think I was also seeing teachers who really did care about how they were modifying curriculum. I also saw kids that were happy, that were engaged, that were engaged with each other, that were relating well to a teacher. So, there were smiles. There was quiet work as well. I remember seeing a group that were really engaged in some aspect that they were reading and that that was going well but that students could connect with that material in their own way. So, for example in one room there may have been a couple of students sitting in desks that they were reading material, other children were sitting in a more comfortable bean bag space and all of that was okay as long as they were connecting with the material.
One of our primary concerns when Nicholas joined the noble community was his anxiety and concerns about reading and his lack of progress in terms of reading. Again, this was coming from a boy who was very talkative, very articulate, has a great vocabulary, and yet reading the whole process of reading terrified him. And we have seen firsthand the benefit of having a structured approach to developing reading skills. I can't say enough about the benefits of the Wilson program and about being at a school where the Wilson program has been consistently delivered with highly competent teachers. And we have seen firsthand the benefits of that approach. And I was amazed at how quickly we saw the benefits of it. So the fact that every day there's repetition around learning to read, the fact that it's done first thing in the morning or if not the 1st class, the 2nd class. So while he's fresh, he's tackling the hardest thing for him alongside other people that are also kind of freaked out by this reading thing and kind of had lost the sense of why reading was even fun in the first place. And so to be able to see that transition and if I look back in terms of timing, I would say about 5 months, 6 months in, he was starting to read more independently. He was able to decode words easier. He was just starting to get more confident. And then it seemed like before we knew it, I think it was during the initial period of COVID in particular where you'd walk by a Zoom meeting and you would hear him reading something and stop and and look. What is he doing? And the first couple of times I could hear him read aloud, from a book, it just – you just end up in tears. Everyone in our family – like I always do little videos and send them to his grandparents.
And it had the same impact because we know how important reading is and we know how joyful it can be to actually read material that you want to read, and he was interested in really complex books about Star Wars and things like that and and now he was having the opportunity to engage with that. And alongside of that came just that his confidence came back and you could see him as a confident learner and then I think he was more able to tackle other aspects of his path. It certainly hasn't been hasn't solved everything but it certainly made school a more enjoyable place for him because he didn't have this huge thing on his back, that he was trying to deal with And I think the other aspect of doing it at Noble I can't underscore enough the fact that he could see that others had his same types of struggles that he did. He wasn't in a class with 30 people thinking and actually in reality being the only person who couldn't read that book And that was just soul destroying for a little person to have to deal with that. So, it was just magic to see that go away.
As a parent, one of the highlights of bringing Nicholas to Noble was automatically feeling like the minute you started a conversation with another parent, they knew where you were coming from. So, yes, every family's experience had its own, individual components, its own differences, but there was a theme that was the same. So, you were talking to another parent who had seen their child struggle in huge ways with what maybe all of us found quite straightforward. So, you know, going to school, learning in class, interacting with peers, for a range of reasons, our children have struggled with that, and it has caused suffering and pain for everyone in the family. And so, you're automatically around people that you don't have to even talk about what's been going on because they get it. There's one parent in particular that was also living in the apartments across the road when they first joined Noble. And Noble was very intentional about connecting new families with each other.
GAYLE:
Here at Noble, we do try to help parents and families foster relationships. And in our next episode you will hear more from Adelle about what happened when we introduced her to that other family who moved into her building after relocating for Noble Academy just as she and Nicholas had done. So please come back next week for part 2 of A Noble Moving Experience.