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Celebrating Growth: Heartspring’s Year-Round Graduations Highlight Therapeutic Education Successes
Our Therapeutic Residential and Day School holds graduation ceremonies where parents, families, and Heartspring staff come together to commemorate students’ accomplishments. However, Heartspring doesn’t hold a graduation ceremony once a year like a traditional school.
Our Residential Program provides 24/7 year-round school and care. Once students complete their educational requirements, they receive a certificate of completion or a diploma, which can happen any time of year. This summer, we had five graduations over two days!
Heartspring students have neurodevelopmental disorder diagnoses and other challenging behaviors and communication needs that require a more directly supportive environment than what’s possible in their home school district. Heartspring staff provide individualized programs to help each student grow and find their path to greater independence.
The doors we help our students open lead to a world of new possibilities. For Gregory’s mother, Rebecca, she said, “It was like we got our son back.” Gregory started his Heartspring journey at two years old in our Outpatient Services for occupational therapy. He later returned as a Heartspring Therapeutic School student. Rebecca said, “Every year he’s been at Heartspring, he says a lot more; we see a lot more of his personality coming out.”
Our school program helps students adapt to their environments. Our strengths-based approach focuses on building the skills students excel at and helps reduce interfering behaviors.
Our students are from all over the country, and for Puru’s family, the distance was what they worried about the most. Puru’s father, Alok, said, “It’s a very emotional choice to have him be away from us.” Puru’s parents said seeing him happy and comfortable during their video calls helped ease their anxieties.
So, what happens after students graduate from Heartspring? We send them off into the world with improved behavior strategies, communication skills, and independence. In most cases, students return home to their families, transition to adult care facilities, or move on to get jobs and live independently.
Celebration is one of our core values. In the Heartspring Therapeutic School, we take pride in small wins, like a child’s first time feeding themselves or using their augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems to communicate their needs. Graduation ceremonies help us take a step back and see the overall growth each student achieves. Every child’s journey is unique, and there’s so much joy at Heartspring to share.
