One-to-One. Every Day.

The challenge:
Take 455 students in Grades 2-12 each year who have

• average to above–average intellectual ability
• well-developed reasoning and comprehension skills
• difficulty decoding, spelling, and writing
• difficulty processing language
• no emotional, social or behavioral issues

and deliver on the promise to "enable and empower students to realize their educational and social potential…"

The solution:

• 320 faculty and staff - 200 teaching faculty
• a completely individualized program and schedule
• one-to-one tutoring for every student, every day
• a school-based Master’s degree program for faculty
• a world-class Outreach Program for  professional development and applied research for educators, professionals and parents

Welcome to Landmark School in Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts.

Founded in 1971, Landmark School is an independent, coeducational boarding and day school with elementary, middle, and college preparatory high school programs for students with language-based learning disabilities. A pioneer in this field, Landmark individualizes instruction for each student and emphasizes the development of language and learning skills within a highly structured and supportive living and learning environment. Landmark’s mission includes an extensive Outreach Program for professional development courses, workshops and publications for educators, administrators, clinicians and parents.

Assistant Head of School and Director of Outreach Dan Ahearn introduced us to the core concepts and the individualization that are fundamental to Landmark’s programs, and the complex database infrastructure that supports them.

“We have a unique mission, unlike any other school,” Ahearn began. “We serve a very closely defined population of kids: high IQ, not achieving up to that potential. Our students have a unique profile: they are bright, intelligent, creative kids. We identify their needs through a lot of diagnostic testing; then we design a program that fits their individual needs.

“Landmark is the largest school of its kind in the country. We enroll 450 residential and day students from all over the world. Every student here gets a one-to-one tutorial every day. We have more than 200 faculty members.

“Students are grouped according to abilities. A student may be exceptionally good in math and not good in reading, for example. So he might be enrolled in Advanced Calculus and Early Literacy. We will move them around as they progress. The structure of the program accommodates this personalization.

“Landmark has small class sizes that average 6-8 students per class. Every student is watched over by a department head, a case manager, and an individual teacher. We teach skills in reading, writing, math, and study skills to give the students access to content areas. We ramp up the skill set before we go on to content. If we’re successful, students may transition out of the school after a few years, so the student body changes.

“Landmark has a full array of programming, including performing arts, athletics and extracurriculars. Our ropes course is a great place to build self-confidence. We pride ourselves on finding a child’s particular strengths; we hammer on those to build their self-esteem.

“The school has a huge faculty. We recruit heavily from the liberal arts—hiring 10–20 new teachers each year. New teachers do not need to have certification; they do need to demonstrate an interest in kids. We prefer to train them ourselves. Our training program is an M.Ed. program through Simmons College in Boston; after three years of teaching at Landmark, the teacher is fully certified. Hundreds of teachers have moved through this program, so we are sending qualified specialists out to other schools.

“We individualize everything. Our student-teacher ratio is 3:1. We do a lot of work on self advocacy with the kids; they learn what services they need, and develop the ability to seek out services at their new school.”

Ahearn started at Landmark in the mid-1970s. He left to practice law—representing kids seeking services. He returned to the school a decade ago.

His relationship with inRESONANCE began in 2007. “We had an old database that had been custom built, and added to, and grafted to. It needed to be replaced. We had gone through a search process with a number of vendors, and signed a contract with one very large vendor. During the implementation process, it all fell apart. We were back to square one. We put together a smaller core group of key players from both campuses. We met for a year, reviewing new proposals. iR was in the top three.

“We were impressed that iR was a FileMaker platform, and we would have the ability to customize, ourselves. iR ‘got it’ that we were unique in our needs. We are still in the transition process; we’re rolling the system in piece by piece.

“As for customizations, many variables come in to play. Our admissions process is different: we don’t have hard dates, we have rolling dates. We have a constant stream of admissions, so the system had to be adaptable. Our screening is significantly more in-depth than other schools’—our testing batteries required that we attach a testing database to PORTAL. It was a pretty complicated installation, all driven off the testing data.

“The way we schedule is different than most schools. We have no preordained classes because we individualize. We create classes based on the profiles of the kids. We move kids and create classes on the fly, literally, over a two-day period before school starts, as we pull data and analyze it. We also have the individual tutoring piece in the course of the schedule: every student gets a one-to-one tutoring session, every day.

“It was a big deal to construct a grid system. We customized KEYSTONE to do it. It’s working. This is our first school year running the system. We made it through admissions season, and we made it through scheduling. The elementary school and middle school have a different schedule from the high school. Our reports have to push data between campuses. It’s a bit more complex than we expected.

“The comments and grades are the easy part. It’s still a work in progress, we’re still training people. We have a big staff, so it’s taking time to train all the layers of people. We have a FileMaker guy inhouse; the FileMaker piece was key for us, and we wanted the support iR could provide.

“In retrospect, it took us a decade to build the old one to the point where we wanted it. Then we tried a pretty big company that thought they could do it, but they crashed and burned. So we started over and that’s when we found inRESONANCE. And it’s working.”

Read more about Landmark School.