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The school for kids who don’t like school

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Dr. Rick Brennan, Founder and Executive Director of Glen Eden Multimodal Centre, a clinical/educational program for children with complex needs, has applied scientific thinking and research as a basis for the personalized treatment and care of these individuals.  With this approach, Glen Eden has successfully treated and educated many children for whom there were no other options.

“Typically, schools use reinforcement or punishment of behaviours or cognitive strategies that require a great deal of self-awareness. Their aim is to eliminate challenging behaviours and replace them with socially acceptable ones, but, in doing so, they do not consider the internal functioning of a child,” explains Dr. Brennan, who opened Glen Eden’s original program in Tsawwassen in 1984. “We do the opposite here. We consider the dynamics of a child’s development, and their internal and adaptive functioning. Our goal is to systematically change the physical and mental health of the child internally before we expect to change their external behaviour.  What we have found is that social and academic success emerges from internal wellbeing.”

 Glen Eden Multimodal Centre is a one-of-a-kind clinical/educational program in North America; and has, for 30-plus years, taken– and transformed – students once deemed as unworkable in all other school-based special programs.

Glen Eden Multimodal Centre’s school program is accredited by the B.C. government and is suitable for children and adolescents with complex psychological, neuropsychiatric, socio-emotional and/or developmental difficulties.

“Our students have not been able to fit into other programs,” says Dr. Brennan. “Rather than try to make the child fit a pre-determined program, we completely build the program around the child and see all behaviours not as good or bad, but as expressions of self.”

To find out more about Glen Eden Multimodal Centre, give them a call at 604-821-1457 to make an appointment, send them an emailor visit their website. They are located at #190-13151 Vanier Place, Richmond, B.C.