Evaluation Services

We offer free, comprehensive, multi-disciplinary evaluations to families who have questions about their preschooler's development in such areas as speech and language skills, cognitive and motor abilities, social and emotional characteristics and learning style. Evaluations, conducted by our caring, qualified and licensed staff, help determine a child's current level of functioning in a way that respects individual needs, strengths and challenges. Evaluations are done in a setting that is comfortable for the child and family. Results are shared in their entirety with parents, through both written and verbal reports.

Special Education &
Related Services (IEP)

Rivendell School delivers intervention services to young children in their homes or residences as well as in a variety of community settings, including: day care centers, preschools, hospitals and shelters. Our staff of New York State certified early childhood special education teachers and licensed psychologists, speech, occupational and physical therapists work closely together with parents to create an individualized learning program that is tailored to a child's specific needs and to maximize his or her inclusion in school life.

Individualized Education Plans (IEPs)

(Preschoolers ages 3 – 5)

When Rivendell's evaluation team recommends supportive services for a child, we work with the family to develop an Individualized Education Plan. The IEP may include recommendations for special education, itinerant teaching, and/or related clinical services, such as speech and language, occupational or physical therapy. Recommendations are tailored to each child's specific needs and aim to support and maximize the child's inclusion in the daily activities of his or her school or center. When special education services are recommended, Rivendell matches a Special Education Itinerant Teacher (SEIT) to work with each child. SEIT teachers work with children in the preschool or daycare center they currently attend. In some cases, children of Rivendell School attend our own Rivendell Preschool, which we have designed to serve as a model of inclusive early childhood education.

For more information please contact michelle.bogosian@rivendellnyc.org.

The CORE Program

Rivendell School's CORE program prepares children for preschool by teaching readiness skills in a flexible environment within Rivendell School that progressively features classroom elements as the child's skills develop. Social curriculum begins with 1:1 teacher and service provider experiences and expands to include CORE peers, regular visitors, and facilitated visits to Rivendell Preschool classrooms.

Children may enter into the CORE program at the age of three or four. They are gradually given opportunities to apply the skills they have learned in CORE within the classrooms of Rivendell Preschool on therapeutically supported visits in accordance with their individual progress. Children who may benefit from the CORE program are children who seem to learn in very specific ways and find great challenge adapting to new experiences, to information presented in new or even slightly different ways, and to changes in their routine. Such children demonstrate strong idiosyncratic aversions to or fixations on certain experiences or objects and therefore find "flexibility" very difficult. Although children considered within the autistic spectrum may benefit from CORE programming, this diagnosis is neither a requirement for nor an exclusive description of program eligibility.

For more information regarding the CORE program please contact Margaret Weiss at Rivendell School margaret.weiss@rivendellnyc.org.