Page 16 - MidWeek - August 17, 2022

14 MIDWEEK AUGUST 17, 2022
Part of the charm of the soon-to-be-open Transforming Lives Center at Assets School is that it not only offers comprehensive learning assessments to its own students, but to nonstudents as well.
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Back in 1955, the early iteration of As- sets School embarked on a mission to help a specific subset of the population: young military children with developmental challenges. Knowing it could do more for its island community, the school altered its mis- sion over the years to also serve students with learning differences and gifted children all the way up to high school. Then, a couple of years ago, the school rewrote its mission statement once again, this time to include advocacy and outreach for the community at large — and part of that revamp is the new Transforming Lives Center, slated to open later this month.
The aptly named resource center at the school’s K-8 campus offers comprehen- sive assessments for children facing difficulties in tradition- al learning environments, as well as those struggling in the classroom after pandemic-era distance learning.
To that end, the Transform- ing Lives Center is not just for students who attend Assets — it’s open to everyone — and that’s for good reason. The campus is serving about 340 students this school year, but statistics show that an average of 1 in 5 kids learn differently.
Parents and their kids who visit the Transforming Lives Center can gain access to screenings or full assess- ments that result in a diag- nosis, though Masa points out that it’s important not to get caught up in the verdict. The diagnosis, he explains, is merely a foundational step- ping stone to figuring out what kinds of tools works for the student.
might not be able to name it, but they know and trust that intuition.
“It’s elevating the work that we already do,” explains head of school Ryan Masa, who notes that Assets has been doing free literacy screen- ings, program development for teachers and parent work- shops for decades now.
“Then, you’re talking about tens of thousands in the state,” adds Masa. “With the Trans- forming Lives Center, we’ve been focused on what we can do to help those kids, know- ing they’ re not all going to come to Assets.”
“And it doesn’t have to be a child failing. It could be someone seeing their real- ly bright child not reaching their full potential or are un- derachieving in a way and have questions about that.”
“Parent intuition is really strong,” Masa says. “Parents know something is going on before anyone else does. They
At the heart of the Trans- forming Lives Center is clin- ical director Dr. Elsa Lee, a neural psychologist, who has more than a decade of expe- rience in psychology and its
SEE PAGE 15