Cheryl
Cheryl Viirand, B.A., J.D., Co-Founder, Head of School, Member of Board of Directors
Cheryl is the visionary behind Cajal Academy, and a “mom on a mission” to revolutionize education by creating models, practices and approaches that actually match to what neuroscientists have learned in the last thirty years about how kids learn, socialize and grow.
Cheryl is a social entrepreneur, a generalist problem solver and a former corporate litigator at the esteemed firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell. As such, Cheryl brought a keen eye for detail and a fresh set of eyes to the field of education. Not held back by “how it’s always been done,” Cheryl built an expert team and, with them, resolved to dig into what scientists know today—and then built systems for applying that science to the data in each child’s profile. This jumping off point is what led to the creation of a whole new approach to education, that is already raising the bar on “what’s possible” with transformative results for kids having a range of different learning, social-emotional and neurophysio needs.
This mission started out as a problem that is all too common for parents with atypical strengths and weaknesses (let alone complex, chronic medical conditions like her own family’s Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome). For years, she had worked with her school district to help them understand her children’s unique mixes of strengths and challenges, bringing them experts to explain their unique medical profiles and articles to at least help predict how those challenges might be connected to the learning and social ‘quirks’ that were becoming ever more common. She had sought out expert therapists in the community who understood not only treatment protocols but the neurological basis of how they work, and learned from them how to understand her kids’ life-lived-experiences as they composite of the skills they give to any given moment—as it is for us all.
For years, Cheryl had sought to bring this same data-driven approach to her kids’ school district teams. She pointed out how these same “specific, addressable problems” that were undermining their academic and social success. And for years, she walked away from PPT meeting after PPT meeting with an IEP full of accommodations and a “whack-a-mole” of tutors and re-regulation services to bridge the gap between those challenges and the general ed curriculum—but no roadmap to address the problems that created the gaps in the first place. The more information she brought to her kids’ team about what was possible, the more it became clear that they were simply having a different conversation: the district leaders understood it to be their job to figure out what her kids can’t do and make accommodations to fill those gaps—and then to “help” Mom realign expectations about their futures that were “realistic” for the challenges they’d have to manage. But as their mom, Cheryl was far more interested in what they can do, and what we can do to help them develop those skills to empower the child to chart their own future, based on their passions and their strengths.
Cheryl realized it was time to pivot, and started reaching out to special education schools across the region in search of a new educational home—only to discover that there was no outplacement school anywhere in Connecticut or Westchester County that provides academics appropriate to kids with high analytical reasoning skills, paired with therapies to address any number of occupational, physical, social-emotional or learning needs. So she and her kids’ occupational therapist, Heather Edwards, vowed to create one—because every kid deserves a school.
Cheryl believes firmly that the only thing more valuable than solving problems for one child is solving problems for many of them. Cheryl was privileged to attend an experimental public high school in Columbia, MD with a “gifted and talented” program where extraordinary educators emphasized that intellectual gifts come with an obligation to apply them to help others. (Go Wildcats). One week after graduating from Barnard College, she was on a plane to Ukraine, where she worked with the Crimean government to help them catalog their hulking post-Soviet tourism assets in preparation for privatization—and then got her first taste of startup work creating the first restaurant guide to the city of Kiev. Returning to the states, she plunged into “dot com bubble” era startups Internet Trading International and Juno Online Services, where she learned the principles of lean startup, and what it means to be part of an organization dedicated to innovation and constant iteration towards your own standard of excellence. Unable to set aside her passions for civil rights, Cheryl went back to school to get her J.D. at New York University School of Law, with a focus on international human rights.
Cheryl left the practice of law in 2008 to dedicate herself to building businesses and non-profit organizations that apply science to increase social inclusion and empowerment for vulnerable populations. Prior to Cajal Academy, Cheryl was the founder, creator and CEO of Freedible, Inc.: a social sharing platform where families with dietary constraints can find and share the recipes, life hacks and community they need to thrive.
Cheryl lives in Connecticut with her husband, dog and two kids—or she will until her oldest goes off to college in the fall, setting forth to chart his own future based on his passions and strengths.