Cedar Hill School

Fond memories of this school in the Mid/Late 1990s while in 3-5th grade. Generous recess time, mostly great teachers, and it was run like a well-oiled machine.

Any parent thinking of moving to this districts for their program for autistic children is crazy. Here's what they've done for my child:
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They present themselves as an organized program with a proven protocol for educating children with ASDs along with a plan to eventually mainstream them. Their reputation is undeserved.

"Individualized" education plans? No, not really. These people have a one-size-size-fits-all program which means they don't know the first thing about meeting the needs of a child with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder..."Spectrum" being the key word here; there is no such this as a one-size-fits-all program for autistic children. If you are looking for a program that can provide a sensory diet for children who have sensory integration issues, you wont find it here...they don't "believe" in it. And when their particular approach doesn't work, they hide behind their strict adherence to the principles of their program and (sarcasm font) real world philosophy of never saying "No" as a reason for not making individualized modifications. They changed my son's reinforcement schedule just about every few days (not an exaggeration) and seem bewildered when that doesn't work. So what do they do next? They change it again. You wouldn't even train a dog this way. I don't see how my son could know what exactly he was working for at any given moment in time. I certainly would have been able to. Just to be perfectly transparent here, I'm not saying my child is easy, in fact, he has serious behavioral issues, but this school led me to believe they were well suited reach him, address his behaviors and educate him. They blindsided me in the middle of the academic year with the news that my child would not be attending their school come the ESY because they were not equipped to meet is needs and I should start looking for a new school. All along I believed they were implementing their "evidence-based" methods & strategies to help my son. They kept me in they dark on just about everything and before I knew it, without even discussing it with me, they dropped all of my son's academics out of his program and allowed him play video games all day. I feel as though they more or less gave up on him. Either that or my 8 year old son was able to outwit & out-strategize an entire team of "experts" to get them to give him exactly what he wanted. In speaking to other PECs whose children attend school in their district, it seems that their MO is to ship out the more difficult children.

When I finally realized I had lost all my faith that they could educate my son and decided to move my child to another school, I got a good dose of reality for how little they actually care about these kids, and how unprofessional, spiteful and malicious they can be. They tried to prevent me from transferring him to a different school and delay his starting, holding my son's academic needs up for ransom for a signature that's not even mandated by any statute under the NJ Depatment of Education It was so arbitrary and capricious, I'm still considering complaining to the NJ Dept of Education about their policies and practices.