Krejci Academy/The Mansion

All in all this school has worked well for our son. How ever some of the staff seem completely lacking in common sense.
Feb 21st, 2020

Dec 19th, 2019

I attended Krejci Academy at the recommendation of the Illinois school district. I attended there for seven years, including summers. I never had a proper summer vacation while attending, nor had a more common high school experience as the school does not allow dances, proms, or Halloween costumes due to a lack of female students and a fear of scaring the small Autistic kids. It was here that I was bullied and punished if I tried to do anything about it and forced to undertake sub-par academics that were either too hard or bored me but never were appropriate for my grade level. Academics were only secondary to various speech programs, outings into the public, and everyday life training where adults often condescended to otherwise gifted children or treated them like they had no ability to tell fact from fiction, often lying to parents that they were misbehaving far more than they were. If they did anything even remotely wrong, they were given a "Caution" but never actually told what the reason for the Caution was, which effectively meant it was not educational, just training them to be afraid that, at any moment, they might be doing something wrong without realizing it. This effectively instills in the child a sense of constant anxiety, introversion, and fear of speaking or acting without overthinking it. The school follows the principle of behavior modification. Force and train the Autistic children like dogs to respond to certain behaviors and hide their own, without actually telling them why or teaching them how the world works. If a child cries, they are literally manhandled into the "time out room." The Time Out Room is small, dirty, empty, rough-carpeted, and has no way of being opened from the inside. The child is effectively trapped inside and has no way of getting out on their own. While inside this room, a staff member is posted outside, but is not allowed to speak to or even acknowledge the existence of the scared, crying child inside who has no idea why he or she is being punished for crying. The child is only let out once they have cried themselves out, which can take hours, and then are never told the reason they were thrown into the time out room. It is a "time out" in name only. In actuality, it is solitary confinement, and it is used on disabled children as young as 11 here with no actual disclosure or explanation to the child who has no rights due to their age and disability. A sense of feeling trapped in a location or situation is largely what causes PTSD, and that is what the Time-Out Room is. A sense of being trapped and unable to escape and not knowing why. This is not a school. Schools educate. Krejci Academy attempts to train disabled children and abuses them in ways that have lasting effects on their psychological states. To this day, as a result of home abuse and abuse from Krejci Academy, I am still dealing with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD. It is worth noting that this practice of solitary confinement and punishing without explaining the reason for it is illegal in the state of New York. Please do not send your Autistic children here. Please listen to them when they explain how the staff abuse them. Please do not try and beat them into pretending to be normal through behavior modification when this only puts a plank of wood over a pot hole and traumatizes them for life.
Nov 9th, 2020

This place is the best, if it wasn't for Mrs Reed and the other nice staff that helped me but I have gotten SO FAR in this school i am a highschooler that thinks that these reveiws are written by kids... they drop a 3 or lower star rating because they are jealous that the other kids are playing and he cant DON'T be that kind of person that gives bad reviews that such a cool and VERY FRIENDLY kind of place. If it was not for this school i would't be headed to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. because my other school GAVE ME NIGHTMARES (Easter seals) gave me the chills just thinking about that place. I am very lucky to end up here where i belong to. For a much shorter review This place is highly recommended to parents that have been searching for schools THIS IS THE PLACE! 1👍 like for the kids that are getting the great help they need!!
Jul 20th, 2019

I went here in 2005 i think to escape a bullying situation in my original school, and i did not like what I see. they use a form of aversive tactic calls cautions, where if you do something wrong, they give you a type of warning called a caution. if you get two in a day, you go out to the hall, and three will land you in the time out room. now for serious issues, this makes sense, since you don't want people hurting other people or being constantly disruptive. HOWEVER, they took it WAY too far here, and often used cautons as their go to method of responding to things, and also gave them over small things which honestly didn't ewarrant it just the first time. Examples, once I went back to the classroom becaise i couldn't find where my class had gone, and when the teacher came back, i got a caution for it before i even was told why this was an issue (and after i had been commended for doing a similar thinge before.). Another time i was reading something and I made a joke about the story, and instantly got slapped with a caution. These examples were far from the only examples of them acting like this, and the major issue is that, for some of these, I or the other students didn't know what they were doing was even wrong, so to be so cold and callous about givign cautions like this without first explaining why what they were doing was an issue and giving them a fair chance to change was unfair. In fact in all honestly, when i was there I was largely in fear of doing anything that even slightly deviated from what they deemed appropriate, lest they deem it inappropriate and get a caution for it. And on the subject of callousness, once I was having a rough day and got sent to the hall, and was oujt ther crying for ten minutes. However, their response, instead of showing some sympathy, was to have the person outside watching me tell me if I didn't get it together I would be sent to the time out room. And I repeat, they acted like this to someone who was CRYING! Callous is honestly the only word I can think of to describe that. All in all, the only thing their approach accomplished for me was to make me resentful of authority, and while this place is certainly no Judge Rotenberg Center, their methods still only succeeded in making me resent authority and being told what today. In fact to thi day, I still have resentment for the volunteers and people who work with the disabled as a whole, likely because I associate those people with the way they acted here and in other special ed programs I've been in. Is it fair, probably not, and admittedly this isn't the only program that does this, or even the worst. However, just because something is 'better' than something else does not automatically make it ideal, and judging by othe rreviews on here, my inclination is that considitons here are still far from ideal.
Dec 19th, 2018