The Kildonan School was a private coeducational boarding and day school in Amenia, New York offering daily one-to-one Orton-Gillingham language remediation and a college preparatory curriculum for students in grades 2-12 and PG. The Kildonan School was exclusively for students with dyslexia and language-based learning disabilities. The school announced in August 2019 that it will close for the 2019-20 school year and will not reopen.
History
The Kildonan School was founded in 1969 by Diana Hanbury King and Kurt Goldman. The college preparatory program, that as of the school's closing in 2019 had a 100% college acceptance rate, evolved from Dunnabeck, the one-to-one Orton-Gillingham based language remediation summer camp also founded by Diana King, which takes place on the school’s campus every summer. Ms. King taught for years at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. and at Camp Mansfield in Vermont, the latter of which was founded by Helene Durbrow, who studied directly under Dr. Samuel Orton. Ms. King has written numerous books on the Orton-Gillingham approach, and she lectures across the country and trains teachers in Orton Gillingham methodology in the US, in Bermuda, and in Asia.
The Orton-Gillingham approach
The Orton-Gillingham approach is a structured, flexible, multisensory way of teaching reading and writing. When implemented at integral times and in appropriate ways, it has been shown to remediate dyslexia to the point of “normal” counterparts. It remediates dyslexia by attending to the neural language-processing system of individuals with high IQs with a seemingly inexplicable deficit in reading or spelling, and departs from older methodologies that focused on the visual system.
Accreditation
The Kildonan School was accredited in 2003 by the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators and re-accredited by NYSAIS in 2013. As of the school's closing in 2019. The Kildonan School had two AOGPE Fellows on staff who mentor each tutor the school employs through 70 hours of pre-tutoring training and the AOGPE associate/certification process.
Complementary programs
Dyslexic students learn language differently from other students – specifically, it has been posited that dyslexics compensate for lack of activity while reading in the angular gyrus with much activity in the inferior frontal gyrus. Research shows, therefore, that dyslexic students tend to also have trouble with balance and coordination. In keeping with brain research that shows that language remediation relies on stimulating connections between brain networks, and specifically between the two hemispheres of the brain, The Kildonan School requires all lower school students to train in horseback riding and all upper school students to learn to ski. These two sports are balance sports, and so require students to make neural connections between both hemispheres of the brain.
Mission and philosophy
Kildonan’s mission of empowering students with dyslexia is in keeping with research by Brock and Fernette Eide and Ben Foss, which shows that a way to open up future opportunities for dyslexics is to play on their strengths. To this end, Kildonan encourages its staff to include The Dyslexic Advantage and The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan in their professional development plans.
