America’s Children Are Unwell. We Need to Ask What Schools Have to Do With It.
The New York Times published a sobering article this week about the growing disconnection between kids and school, and it lands squarely at the heart of why we are building Sacramento Community School. The piece names what so many families already feel: our children aren’t broken. The systems surrounding them are. When nearly one in four teenage boys is diagnosed with ADHD, when a third of adolescents carry an anxiety diagnosis, and when school is the place where distress most often emerges, it becomes impossible to avoid the real question: What if the problem isn’t the kids? What if it’s the environment they’re being asked to endure?
For far too long, American schooling has operated on a narrow definition of “normal,” expecting all children to learn, focus, socialize, and behave in the same way. When they don’t, we pathologize the child rather than interrogate the structure. As the Times put it, “the track has become narrower and narrower,” and the wider the range of human development grows, the more children are told they’re deviating from some imagined standard. But neurodiversity is not deviation. It is the natural variation of human brains, no different in legitimacy than differences in height, culture, language, movement, or personality. And with 1 in 5 people identifying as differently wired, this is not a small subset of youth. It is a key part of the future.
At Sacramento Community School, we are building a different response, one rooted in the belief that the environment should change, not the child. We are not designing a program for one type of learner. We are designing a school for children, full stop. A place where curiosity, rest, movement, sensory needs, and relationships are treated as fundamental human requirements; where a child’s way of engaging with the world is seen as information, not deficiency; and where difference is not something to tolerate, but something to understand, celebrate, and plan with. This is what it means to take a strengths-based, neurodiversity-affirming approach.
This is not a niche alternative or a retreat from rigor. It’s an act of educational justice, and it is long overdue. If we want a generation capable of creative problem solving, collaboration, and meaningful contribution, we cannot keep forcing them through systems designed for a much narrower path. The future is differently wired. And it’s time our schools were, too.
Public educators work incredibly hard within structures that often move at the pace of legislation rather than human need. We want good schools for all kids, and we believe that real transformation sometimes has to happen outside the system in order to show what’s possible. Sacramento Community School isn’t an escape from public education; it’s a small, nimble model that can try things quickly, learn from them, and offer a vision that might inspire broader change. Our goal is not to critique public school parents or teachers, but to build something hopeful that contributes to a future where every child, in every setting, can thrive.
