Good Schools, like good societies and good families, celebrate and cherish diversity.
- Deborah Meier

Individualization

At THS, we understand and celebrate the fact that each child is unique, and that each child has different strengths, weaknesses, interests and abilities. Therefore, it does not surprise us when a child who is particularly gifted or advanced in one or more areas also has some areas in which he or she needs additional help.

The Harbour School is not a “Learning Support” school.* We believe that all children have special learning styles and we work very hard to meet these with our small classrooms and individualized educational programs. However, some children have more specific needs or extreme strengths or deficits that may benefit from more intensive intervention not provided in the mainstream classrooms. For these children, we have extra learning support programs.

We address special educational needs in our learning support programs in a number of ways.

• Programming for Academically or Artistically Advanced: Children with advanced abilities or skills require special programming that extends their reasoning, develops leadership skills, and allows them to progress at an accelerated pace in their areas of strength. This can be done through pull-out programming, the use of technology, or the use of external distance learning programs. (For example, we have several children who work online with the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth in lieu of or in addition to the classroom programming in math.) We also have a support team member who is tasked with extending or adapting curriculum to address the specific academic or artistic talents of our students.
   
• Learning Support Team: Our learning support team provides individual or small-group instruction to learners who have identified specific learning disorders in academic areas such as reading, writing, or mathematics, as well as to those who have difficulty in social or behavioral skills. The number of hours provided per week may vary from one-half hour to several hours, and is determined in cooperation with parents and teachers
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• Classroom “Shadows”: Sometimes children who can access the mainstream curriculum without difficulty may still have behavioral or attentional problems that are severe enough to necessitate the presence of an adult helper in the classroom. Shadows are trained to minimize intervention, with the goal of eventually withdrawing completely and allowing the child to function independently in the classroom. Only one child per mainstream classroom is accepted into this program.
   
• Finally, the Harbour School maintains a special relationship and shares space with its “sister school,” The Children’s Institute of Hong Kong, which provides one-on-one Applied Behavioral Analysis programming for children with Autism. These children are provided with their own individual program of study, and join The Harbour School for assemblies, celebrations, and those classroom activities that may be appropriate for them.

* We are aware that there is a chain of schools that is coincidentally named The Harbour School in operation in the United States and the United Kingdom, and that these schools are specifically for children with special educational needs. These schools are not related in any way to The Harbour School in Hong Kong, which is named in reference to Victoria Harbour. While we support the goals of these other schools, we would like to emphasize that our school is not part of that chain.