| For Professionals / ParentsGarfield Park Academy has one of the most intensive academic and therapeutic programs in New Jersey. Therapeutically, we have available a wide range of health care professionals to serve all aspects of the students' needs:
Clinically, we use a Developmental Psychopathology Intervention Planning Model. This transdisciplinary approach allows us to integrate many perspectives. Our focus is on developmental, psychological, familial, social, sensory-perceptual, stress and coping, cognitive-linguistic, and neuropsychiatric perspectives.
As a part of our approach, We also place special emphasis on developing a child's communication skills, which affect both academic and social skills. One example is in teaching children social pragmatic communication skills. Our approach goes far beyond teaching only social scripts and hoping that these scripts generalize into long term behavioral changes. Instead, we strengthen the underlying cognitive and linguistic factors that are problematic, such as dramatically increasing joint attention, listening comprehension, social patterning, and social referencing. Only when a child makes progress in these more basic cognitive-linguistic skills do we see progress in generalizing social and communication skills. Equine Assisted Psychotherapy Program
Most recently, we have begun an Equine Assisted Psychotherapy / Learning Program.
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we have fully imbedded our school-wide cognitive-behavioral model within the class coursework and classroom structure. This seamless integration allows us to address motivation, problem solving, goal setting, inference, etc., as they apply to either academics or therapeutic issues.
In this program the students work with horses and benefit therapeutically.
