BRIDGE School of Life

The Bridge Program is designed for English-speaking students who are experiencing language transition issues or psychological difficulties as well as Korean-speaking students with extensive language acquisition delays followed by difficulty in following the standard school curriculum.  

This program is strongly recommended for students who are at the bottom 10 to 20th percentile in verbal comprehension and related cognitive and learning related scores in the Comprehensive Psycho-educational Evaluation and have shown little to no progress in language development for 2 to 3 years as well as whose primary teachers report that they have continuously displayed delays in learning as they move on the next grade level.  

In general, the school curriculum is designed for students in the average intelligence range (25 to 75th percentile). Most Korean students try to improve their grades by attending private academic institutes (called hagwons in Korea) or tutoring that mostly retrain the students with the same content that they learn at school either by reviewing or previewing materials.

However, if a student has serious problems with cognitive ability, intelligence level, language development, or emotional behavioral development identified by a psycho-educational evaluation, these regular public or private educational approaches may not solve his learning difficulties; rather, these will only lead to maladjustment to school and deterrence in learning the essential knowledge. If such gap in knowledge acquisition accumulates for more than two years, then most children suffer from severe emotional and behavioral disorders and intensified conflicts with their parents and teachers.

 
The Bridge Program is recommended for children who are already experiencing or expected to encounter the aforementioned problems. It requires the children to temporarily stop attending the regular school system to focus solely on improving their cognitive and language development, following the clinical and psycho-educational curricula explicitly written in the Individualized Psycho-Educational Plan, IPEP.

It is comprised of at least 1 hour of clinical session per week along with 12 to 15 hours of psycho-educational sessions and 10 to 12 hours of ABCMM during which children self-study while practicing behavior modification on their own. It runs from Tuesday to Saturday from 10AM to 3 or 4PM for primary school students and from 10AM to 5PM for secondary school students.  
 If students in the Bridge Program have achieved and are maintaining 40th percentile or above in language and learning-related functions evaluated by the second Comprehensive Psycho-educational Evaluation as well as other standardized tests after participating in the program for a certain period of time, then they will graduate from the program.

Children who join the program before entering kindergarten enter kindergarten after graduating from the program and those who join the program when they are in elementary school enter either junior high or high schools upon graduating from the program. In the case of high school students, some aim to enter college while others decide to have a job depending on their interests and talents.  
 
The Bridge Program may incorporate an accredited homeschooling curriculum in English-speaking countries in its IPEP, and students can receive a certificate or diploma set forth by the homeschooling institution. Depending on their internal policies, most English-speaking international schools accept homeschooling-certified credits, certificates, or diplomas; in such case, the Tree Group will provide a copy of the student’s Comprehensive Psycho-educational Evaluation result and a letter or recommendation with his treatment progress records.