If your child has special needs

This note is for parents who think their child has special needs (LD, Dyslexia, ADHD, Autism etc) and are considering Geniekids - aarohi as a school option:

First - What Geniekids is not:

• Geniekids is not a special education school. Neither we are equipped to nor do we have any expertise in working with children with special needs. We do not have any special educators in our team. None of us are qualified to work with the special needs of special children. We do not even claim to be an 'integrated' or 'inclusive' school. We are just a school who does not discriminate between children - and hence accepts to work with any child.
• Geniekids is not in a position to offer any one to one work with any child. The faculty works with a group (our group size is maximum one teacher in a group of max 12 children) - hence cannot offer continuous individual attention to any one child.
• Geniekids is not a place to look for specific academic achievement or developmental results. Since our approach is not result oriented, such an expectation is bound to disappoint you.

Second - What Geniekids is:

• All children are welcome to join geniekids.
• Geniekids considers all children as "special and equal" - hence there is no comparison between children. All children are treated equally, without any discrimination. All children are given equal attention, there are no favors for any child.
• Geniekids works on the philosophy of exposure. We believe that when we offer a child rich exposure the child will learn naturally - in his own way, in his own pace, own amounts and own choice of learning content. Hence different children learn differently and different amounts and different things.
• This leads to the understanding that each child is responsible for his or her learning and would do the same independently. We follow the approach of training (empowering) each child to become independent for his doing and learning. This takes time. This may require help of the parents till your child is ready for independent learning. Hence our first goal is to make the child an independent learner.
• Geniekids is a parents organization - parents are all the time equally involved. We share all information with parents, right from what we plan to do, to what happened, individual child observations, etc. But more importantly parents are expected to be completely involved in the child's learning and hence are equally responsible for child's learning and developmental results. For this parents may be required to either put effort at home or may be asked to come inside the class. This coming into the class could be on a regular basis or on a sporadic basis. This is driven by the specific child's needs and the decision is largely taken by the faculties who are regularly working with the child.
• If the child requires one to one work then it is the parents onus to either be available in the class or arrange for a trained assistant to do that. Kindly note the faculty, since she has to focus on all children equally cannot be assumed to give one to one attention to the child. However, we do use a variety of strategies to make the child work in the class as effectively as possible. A lot of strategies are documented on our website. The rest can be experienced when the parent is inside the class.
• Geniekids works on open ended activity / project basis. All our activities are open ended. This means there is no expected end result and hence each child will reach different results.
• Geniekids mostly uses simple material to work with children. We do not subscribe to sophisticated material or costly equipment for learning. Parents are encouraged to explore and understand how our open activities using simple materials help children. This can be best done by observing a session.
• Geniekids believes in non judgmental and non-quantitative observations of each child. We are not in a position to offer specific documentation for any child beyond the extensive, though qualitative observations that we record. We do not assess the child, but share rich observational data about the child on a daily basis through our website.
• Geniekids believes in parity of policy for ALL children and parents.

Kindly discuss (in person) and openly share your expectations as well as concerns BEFORE you admit your child in geniekids. We would further clarify what we can do and cannot do in such personal meetings. We would like to promise only what we can deliver and in most cases would deliver what we promise :-)