We had my son at the VLC for 1 year. The staff are all fully certified teachers, are kind, and mean well. A couple of the teachers are older and have more experience. If your child is with them, they are fantastic and will likely do really well. The rest of the staff seem to be young, fresh out of teacher college, and regularly turn over.
The premise of this place is that it is run by an Educational Psychologist who assesses all children before tutoring commences and designs a specific programme for each child to follow. While this was expensive, this is a great approach.
Unfortunately, my experience was that the teachers are not trained in any sort of special ed, or multisensory learning. In fact I've heard them boast that they 'do their own thing.' Which is a shame, given the millions of dollars of research-based interventions available that they are refusing to educate themselves with. The teachers have some ideas, and do their best with the in-house tools, but in our case they fell short entirely due to lack of actual training. Kids who struggle in school don't struggle because they need more of the same. They struggle because they need a different approach. I did not find this here. The centre makes a big deal about brain plasticity and neurology...but what I saw was a dated programme, with no evidence of any of the new research in this field that has come out in the past 20 years.
They do have some interesting cognitive training programmes. I was pretty excited about them to start with, but it became clear that they are not research-based. Based on the research I have read on these type of 'brain training' programmes, they are unlikely to have any measurable effect, except perhaps to improve scores on the WISC intelligence test as they are very similar to the tests within that assessment.
If your child just needs a bit of extra 1:1 support, then the VLC is a good place to get it. Frankly, if this is the case, go find yourself a good tutor off craigslist or use the teachers tutoring service for half the cost. If your child has an LD, I suggest you find someone who is trained in modern, research-based strategies who can intervene and help your child catch up with his/her peers.
One benefit of being part of the VLC was the extraordinary amount of service we received from the Ed Psych. She really cares about her kids, and attended a school meeting with us without charging us a dime for her time.
Unfortunately, we were saddened to discover that once we left we were completely cut off from support from her. We requested to pay for her time, but she wouldn't even return our emails. I couldn't believe it, after all the money we had spent at the place! Due to this, we lost 6 more months before my child was able to have the IEP he needed to be supported properly at school, plus we had to pay out of pocket for another psychologist.
If you choose to send your child here, make sure that someone is doing regular progress testing with your child, to track that they are improving at a rate that will enable them to catch up with their peers. Otherwise, you are simply paying a higher rate for regular tutoring. read more
