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History Bay Area Educational Institute (BAEI) was founded for the purpose of starting an independent high school that serves secondary students in the Bay Area with learning differences. The school, the only one of its kind in the East Bay, opened September 4th, 2007. The need for a comprehensive high school for students with learning differences is well known. Roughly fifteen percent of the total population has some form of learning disability. Students with learning disabilities may be highly talented and intelligent, yet unable to succeed in traditional schools due to conditions such as dyslexia, ADHD, auditory processing disorder, non-verbal learning disorders, Asperger’s Syndrome, or a host of other, major challenges. Schools devoted to addressing their special needs are far too rare. The scarcity of such schools in the San Francisco Bay Area -- especially in the East Bay region -- is a particularly dire problem. And while several mainstream private high schools occasionally enroll learning disabled students, they welcome only those whose deficits are at the mildest end of the spectrum. A still smaller number of students from families of means are able to attend special education boarding schools on the East Coast. Regrettably, however, most students with learning disabilities struggle, and many times fail, in school settings that are neither equipped nor designed to address their neurobiological differences. The creation of a new high school for learning disabled teenagers is born out of a vision that more must be done to educate this population of deserving, special needs students and thus assure them the opportunity to thrive as productive and contributing members of society. Building on What Has Come Before The course being charted for this new high school draws directly on the decades-long success of Raskob Institute and Day School, a program of Holy Names University in Oakland, California. Established in 1973, Raskob Day School is licensed as a nonpublic, non-sectarian school that offers fulltime instruction to learning disabled children in 3rd through 8th grades. The Raskob Institute, founded in 1953, is one of the oldest tutoring centers in the U. S. Following the unanimous endorsement of its board of trustees in October 2004, Holy Names University expanded Raskob’s offerings by opening a high school in September 2005. Their decision was based, in major part, on well-identified demand for these specialized educational services. While small relative to conventional schools, Raskob High School was designed to accommodate and instruct more students than any comparable special education high school in Northern California. In Fall 2005, teachers welcomed a fully enrolled 9th grade class of 20 students – implementing the first phase of a plan to add a grade each successive year until the high school reached a full enrollment of 80 students in all four grades. Just five months later, in January 2006, the university announced with regret that, although the high school program has an outstanding curriculum and teachers, addresses a pressing community need, and covers expenses through its own revenues, campus space will no longer be available to house it. Increasing enrollment in the university’s undergraduate program -- its top priority -- necessitated the reversal of the university’s decision to expand Raskob. Raskob High School can occupy campus space and continue with 9th and 10th grade classes through the 2006-07 school year, after which time the high school’s operations will be suspended and its classrooms converted to college use. Following Holy Names University's decision to end Raskob High School after the 2006-2007 school year, Bayhill High School was incorporated as the Bay Area Educational Institute in February 2006, as a California non-profit corporation, by a group of Raskob Day School and Raskob High School parents and staff. In March 2006, the Board of Trustees was appointed, bylaws were adopted, and officers were elected.
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