White Clay understands that a developmental relationship approach to learning, such as the DIR/Floortime, is key to helping children build healthy foundations for relating communicating and thinking. This naturalistic approach (learning through interaction and discovery) tends to improve critical foundational skills such as engaging, relating with others and reading social signals. Through this FEDC (Functional Emotional Developmental Capacity), framework we tailor appropriate structured behavioral interventions into the child's program to build a comprehensive framework designed to grow each child's ability to relate, communicate and think. 

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Our Emotional Support- Complex Communicative Need (ES-CCN) pods are based on the DIR/Floortime model. We believe that our non to low speaking students need a high level of child- led,  emotion- based programming in order to capture their interests and attention. We believe once this attention and interest is captured, we can continue to develop and integrate  the child's language , sensory motor, and visual spacial needs. This development will then enable our children to form a sense of themselves as intentional, interactive individuals and further develop their cognitive, language and social capacities.

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Within Phoebe's Pachyderm Pod we have two classrooms: ES-CCN 1 (ages 5 to 8), ES-CCN 2 (ages 9 to 12)

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Our graduating 9th grade students will then have the option of moving on to our Vocational Transition Program, which is based out of our farm campus,  for ages 15 to 19