Acacia Academy

Acacia Review
Pros
-Best teaching and specials staff I have ever worked with!
-Owner a pioneer for due process and alternative settings in LaGrange a suburb renown for special education for decades!

Cons
-Fast pace as in NO breaks, beg for bathroom as needed
- Always short staffed
-Too many secrets and lies - guised as privacy issues
- Poor communication across teams, grade levels, school. (see con above)
-Paras need more training - beyond data collection - basic special ed. methods
- Dependence is admin focus rather than independence (possibly $$?)
- Not for veterans or anyone with behavior management experience.
See "advice" below

Advice for management
My advice is to job seekers/parents . As a LBS1 and a former RBT, I advise you- IF you have ANY experience with behavior modification AVOID this school.
Admin constantly undermines the outstanding classroom management of staff. In fact, admin has no constructive consequences for negative behaviors (bx). Instead negative bx is rewarded and even created! One admin in particular is flagrant for this. Can only assume since it has been the case for 5 years that the owner and rest of admin are complicit. I certainly was not going to be able to change anything. So students and staff continue to suffer unrealistic and harmful environments.
The school website claims not to be a behavioral school. However, they are vastly inadequate in meeting bx needs of the population they serve. (Most disabilities, even gifted have bx characteristics by definition.)
Look Elsewhere
To management:
I am respectfully writing this review in lieu of veteran and employment lawsuit(s) and accreditation complaint. Under the current admin both of which are bound to happen.

Horrible place for autistic child! I placed my Asperger's son here privately, believing their shtick about everyone working at their own pace, small environment,professional staff. I paid a lot of money to put him there, and essentially, he was treated like dirt. This school really is all about getting kids from the public schools who were tutioned out and charging the school districts a great deal of money for tuition and extra therapy. When I placed my son here privately, they did not even bother to get his IEP or school records. They did not implement an IEP for him. They did not call me to discuss the lack of IEP. My son did not work at his own pace-he sat around playing on the computer because he was academically higher than the other kids in his class. Then he started getting suspended because a behaviorally disordered girl decided to target him and accuse him of sexually harrassing her. She was allowed to tell him all sorts of gang lingo things-"I own you" , etc, but was never disciplined. Then one day he dropped his pencil and she grabbed it and held it between her legs and told him to "come and get it." When he tried to grab it she told staff that he had touched her vagina. The disciplinarian,Debbie, who was allegedly a psychologist, accused my son with no proof. She questioned him over and over, even though he had autism and did not understand what she was accusing him of. When I pointed out to her that he had no disciplinary record from his previous school and that he did not do this she would not believe me. She continually harrassed my autistic child and allowed this BD girl to continue to harrass him. It took 2 years for my autistic son to finally explain to me what had happened. There were other things-no receipt given for the tutition I paid, teachers taking the school supplies I provided for their own private use, a missing psychology profile they were supposed to have performed at my cost upon admission. I ended up pulling my son out of this school and sending him to the local public high school where he has had no problem. The staff at his school are NOT trained to work with autistic students, no matter what their website says. This was the worst school experience my son every had and I was paying for it! What a nightmare!

racist teachers, strange and irresponsable ways of dealing with students having a hard time, ignoring kids that have depression and are crying in the hall

We are very happy with Acacia Academy! The school has a warm, welcoming environment. My daughters teachers are very friendly, educated and informative. We are looking forward to Earth Day in the spring to plant flowers in the school's nature center. Thanks Acacia!