A secondary classroom inside The Grace School filled with students ages 15 to 20 practice math skills this morning. Their teacher uses a clicker to help them focus on a Smart Board filled with colorful illustrations of ice cream cones.
"How many yellow ones do we have?" she asked, a student calling out a number. "Why, good job dude, yeah! So let's count out of all together: 2 + 1 equals 3!"
A few days earlier, while classes were on short summer recess, the school's academic director, Lauren Murphy, provided a tour of the facility.
"We're having some renovations done, a little bit of a face lift, so we're touching up spots and painting," she said. "We currently have four classrooms. Our ratio is one teacher to six students, small group sizes so we can be a little more intensive and a little more intentional with what we're doing."
Murphy is a certified pre-K-12 teacher with special education. She also has a Registered Behavior Technician certification. She said the mission of The Grace School is to help an array of kids with developmental disabilities who are unable to succeed in conventional academic settings acquire learning skills so they can return to their preferred learning environment.
"That could be back to public school, that could be to a private or charter school, you have kids transition to home school settings, and we've had kids transition into adult services, or the workforce," she said. "So it can vary depending on their age and what their plan is."
The Grace School accepts students ages 5 to 21.
"We group our classrooms by both age and ability and so our primary class may be a group of students who range in age from 5 to 8 or 9, but all have similar skill sets."
Intermediate classes range from ages 10 to 14 years old, secondary 15-to-18, and transitional 19 to 21 years old. All classrooms have interactive digital boards, whiteboards with markers, and classroom learning materials that are also used by occupational, physical and speech therapists on staff.
We walk into the school's recreation room, today crowded with staff engaged in professional development.
"We have a swing, and we are in the process of getting a new trampoline," Murphy said. "And we also have a media room with library books, puzzles, and WeVideo games."
Staff are trained to work with students who become overstimulated by environmental sensitivities to certain sounds and bright lights.
"So it depends on their intervention plans, and it depends on what those needs might be," she said. "It can range from adding or removing certain things in the environment, providing different coping skills for them to work through those difficulties, communication to just let us know that they need that break. Sometimes it's putting on headphones, sometimes it's taking a walk and sometimes it's leaving the room altogether for short amount of time in a separate space."
To help, the school has built a new sensory room where the environment can be adjusted to calm agitated students.
"It's just a quiet space, to regulate all things going on, externally, or internally," she said, "whether it’s by rolling around on a mat or a bean bag, or having a compression blanket."
Murphy said it works well to aggregate students according to age and ability.
"We want to make sure that our students are working on similar tasks and have similar communication skills, so that way they can learn not just from the teacher in the classroom but from each other and have good peer modeling," she said. "So, across classrooms we have a variety of disabilities, we have a variety of communication abilities, we have students who are using augmentative communication devices and then also just verbal speech."
We enter the school lunch room next, where Murphy said students bring their preferred foods. Staff are on hand to help with eating skills and, most importantly, creating social connections in the lunchroom.
"Do I wanna sit by this person or that person," Murphy explains, "what are appropriate conversations to have with my peers in the lunch room, what can I do if I finish, do I need to clean my face or do I need to clean my area, throw my trash away — all those skills that typically, somebody somewhere along the way, taught us how to do, that our kids just haven't quite got."
The Grace School was founded in 2010 by Kym Hannah, a licensed physical therapist. The school was accredited in 2021.
"It's not the first for learners with disabilities," Hannah said. "It is the only one that I have found that uses the combination of precision teaching and applied behavior analysis to facilitate academic success."
Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, is the gold standard for students with autism spectrum disorders, or ASDs. The data-driven, evidence-based approach works to replace negative behaviors in children with autism and other developmental disorders with positive behaviors conducive to learning.
"So the idea isn't for them to come here and stay here forever," Hannah said. "We're teaching them how to get their behaviors under control, teaching them how to learn, helping them understand how they learn, so they can go back into their lesser restrictive learning environment with other students and be successful."
Which can take two years or as long as six. Of the 180 private schools in Arkansas, less than a dozen offer special education curricula and interventions for youth with disabilities. But The Grace School is different, Hannah said.
"Some individuals that have learning disabilities, severe learning disabilities, all the way to kids with severe autism, have some pretty aggressive behaviors," she said. "And that's how the classrooms are structured based on their level of need, so it's a pretty big range. And a lot of these parents, the majority of them, come here because they feel like they're in a desperate situation. They're being called to come get their child on a regular basis from school, or whatever environment their child is in. And not only is it a struggle when their child is not in school, but now it's becoming a struggle when their child is in school for parents to have any respite. These parents can't hold down jobs maybe, or don't have time to do the things they need to do, because they have to be on call for their children."
The Grace School also provides respite to students. Maddison Haynes is one of those students. She's diagnosed with autism and hydrocephalus, a neurological disorder. Her parents, Oliva and Adam Haynes, enrolled Maddie in The Grace School in 2019, at age 15 when she was in 10th grade. She graduated last May. Previously, she was enrolled in a public high school.
"She spent her first year at a large school in Rogers," said Adam Haynes. "She experienced a lot of bullying at that point and so we were looking for someplace smaller that was more accepting and more accommodating."
Maddie is now enrolled in a life skills and collegiate experience program for students ages 18-to-25 called Launch, operated by the nonprofit Life Styles in Fayetteville.
"Year one and two are class studies, year three is internships and job training with the goal being, that after year three, you should be able to get a job in the northwest Arkansas community," Haynes said, explaining the Learns program.
The end goal for Maddie is to one day live independently in supportive housing, her father said. He credits The Grace School's innovative special educational model for helping his daughter truly succeed.
"Year after year after year she would move from sixth grade to seventh grade to eighth grade," he said. "It may not have taken a full year for her to do that, sometimes it took a year and a half to make progress, but she grew in her educational skills."
Haynes said the school's tightly structured routine also helped Maddie.
"They stuck to the same schedule the same days which for a person with autism dramatically reduces anxiety and stress, so just that routine and structure did a lot for her."
Sawyer Garrison enrolled in The Grace School in the autumn of 2022. He's 8 years old. His mom, Tara, said Sawyer has an autism spectrum disorder.
"Sawyer very early on had a hard time, as much as most children do on the spectrum," she said, "you know making eye contact. We weren't meeting goals around age 2 and 3. He was nonverbal, he was very anti-social, he had no speech."
But now? On his third year at The Grace School?
"He's making more eye contact," Garrison said, "and he's so much more social as the years go on. And a lot more verbal. We can talk now."
She said that Sawyer appears to enjoy hanging out with peers — who don't judge him.
"And prior to The Grace School he was having a hard time making friends," she said. "If we went to a playground, he wouldn't approach a child. Here The Grace School provides them with every opportunity to be social and to help them navigate how to be social."
The Arkansas LEARNS Act of 2023 provides up to 90% of annual per-student funding to students with disabilities to attend private schools, like The Grace School, through Arkansas Education Freedom Accounts, formally known as Succeed Scholarships. This school year, per-student funding is valued at $6,856 dollars.
Last school year, 5,300 students applied to receive the vouchers in the first year of the program. Of those students, 44% qualified because of disabilities. The number of EFA recipients has more than doubled this school year.
Almost 200 (190) private schools currently operate in Arkansas, with half of them qualifying for voucher funding by the Learns Act. Most are Christian, including The Grace School. But Kym Hannah said religion is not taught.
"It's not in our curriculum or anything," she said. "we're faith-based, we're founded under, you know, foundations of faith and we have Bible studies -- our staff do that kind of thing --but it's not something that's integrated into the curriculum."
The Grace School's behavior technicians and board-certified behavior analysts are especially adept at helping to calm students with severe aggression disorders, she said.
"Oftentimes these kids come in and they aren't able to go to school because they are throwing computers, attacking people, and the school," she said, causing classroom destruction. "But they don't know what they are supposed to do, right?"
As a consequence, their parents are constantly on call, she said.
"The parents are being called daily, to come in and pick 'em up. So, we want those kids, those are the kids that we want, the ones that are in desperate situations because they can't function in a group setting. Because maybe they're hurting themselves, they're hurting others, they're destructive, whatever reason. So as a staff we're taking on a client or student that was being sent home daily for destruction. So that's very taxing. But we're saying we are not going to send your kid home."
The goal is for students to sit independently and to learn independently, Hannah said. But some students do remain at the Grace School for the duration rather than return to their previous school or learning center because it’s the best environment for them.
"We went from a kid that required three people, three adults one-on-one," she said. "And now he's sitting in a classroom, doing calendar work, planning his day! So it's pretty rewarding."
Hannah has a daughter with disabilities, Mira, now 19, who's inspired her life's work in therapeutic special education.
"We adopted her from Ukraine when she was 4 and she had a lot of mental health and physical disabilities going on," she said. "And that's when we founded The Grace School, when it was time for her to start school because we needed a different environment for her. The most successful thing was using ABA to reduce all these behaviors that she had learned the first four years of her life that were interfering with her learning, to communicate, eat, everything. And so, then all of a sudden, speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy became a lot more valuable and a lot more productive because she could attend to the tasks. Those behaviors of hand flapping or making shapes in the air or whatever were replaced with things that were more functional."
Kym Hannah is also president of the Children's Therapy T.E.A.M., which she co-founded with Cindy Watson in 2000. She offers outpatient pediatric patients physical, speech, and occupational therapy, as well as applied behavior analysis. The first clinic was established in Fayetteville. Since then four more facilities have opened in northwest Arkansas employing over 220 staff, which are currently treating 1,800 youngsters with disabilities.
As for The Grace School, it has a perpetual waitlist, drawing an increasing number of students enrolled in public school systems who are under Arkansas Department of Education Special Education Services Plans. So, plans are underway, Hannah said, to relocate to a new, larger campus facility.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
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