St. Margaret of
Castello's House

St. Aloysius de Gonzaga’s Regulation & Movement Academy

For children with ADHD and tic disorders, the traditional classroom gets the order of operations exactly backwards: it demands stillness first and offers movement as a reward — when for these children, movement is the very thing that makes stillness possible.

Named after St. Aloysius de Gonzaga—the patron saint of youth, a boy of restless energy and fierce willpower who, when asked in the middle of a game what he would do if the world ended within the hour, answered, “I would keep playing”—the Regulation & Movement Academy is built on his answer.

The Academy serves as our center for executive-function support, behavioral regulation, tic-disorder care, and abundant structured movement — an active, highly structured environment resting on one clinical conviction: for many children, movement is not a break from the treatment. It is the treatment.

  • Movement Is Prescribed, Never Earned

    Physical movement and heavy-work breaks are scheduled into every academic hour and placed before academic blocks, when they do the most good — because a regulated body is the precondition of a focused mind. And movement is never taken away as punishment: removing recess for unfinished work removes the medicine because the symptom appeared.

  • A Zero-Judgment Culture

    Tics, wiggles, pacing, and restlessness are met with quiet acceptance by staff, Sisters, and peers alike — a whole community deliberately trained to not react. A child here is never the disruption. They are simply a child whose body is speaking, in a house that has learned to listen.

  • The Interdisciplinary Regulation Team

    Staffed by psychologists and occupational therapists holding CBIT certification, special educators, movement and physical-education staff, and a consulting psychiatrist or developmental pediatrician — working hand-in-hand with the Sisters, cottage caregivers, and the nursing team at St. Rita of Cascia’s Hope and Resilience Center.

The Four Pillars of the Regulation & Movement Academy

Structured Movement & Heavy Work

Focus: Making motion the skeleton of the day — planned, purposeful, and joyful — so every child’s nervous system gets what it needs on schedule rather than by meltdown.

Components

  • Movement-Centered Prioritization, Always A run, a climb, a wheelbarrow circuit takes priority over forced learning — this is the daily architecture of the whole academy.
  • All-Weather Movement Spaces Indoor and outdoor gross-motor environments available in every season, so regulation never waits on the forecast.
  • Heavy-Work Prescriptions Push, pull, carry, dig, knead — proprioceptive heavy work matched to each child’s profile, delivered both in the movement rooms and through real jobs in St. Cajetan’s guilds, where hauling watering cans and kneading dough are regulation disguised as honorable work.
  • Active Classrooms by Design Standing desks, wobble stools, stability balls, and floor options built into every learning space — because the right to move while thinking shouldn’t require a diagnosis.
  • Prayer in Motion Walking the Rosary around the garden path, processions, and active liturgical service roles — a faith built for moving bodies rather than one that demands long stillness as the price of belonging.

Executive Function & Organizational Mastery

Focus: Teaching the invisible skills — planning, starting, sequencing, finishing — explicitly and visually, so no child is ever punished for a skill they were never taught.

Components

  • Task-Chunking & Visual Micro-Steps Larger projects and chores broken into manageable, visual micro-tasks with immediate positive reinforcement at each completion.
  • Organizational-Skills Training Explicit instruction in backpack systems, checklist habits, time-mapping, and materials management — practiced daily until they belong to the child.
  • Daily Report Cards Done Right Simple, strengths-forward daily goal cards shared between classroom and cottage, so every adult in the child’s day reinforces the same three wins.
  • Transition & Time Supports Visual timers, countdown warnings, and predictable routines that make the shape of the day visible — dissolving the anxiety of “what comes next.”
  • Beating Decision Paralysis Gently Choices offered two at a time, starting rituals for hard tasks, and body-doubling-style companionship for daunting work — support without surveillance.

Tic-Disorder Care & CBIT

Focus: Delivering the first-line, gold-standard treatment for tics inside the only environment where it fully works — a community that has stopped staring.

Components

  • CBIT, Delivered to Protocol Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics — the first-line treatment named by the American Academy of Neurology — one-to-one with certified clinicians, eight sessions over ten weeks, boosters as needed.
  • Never Suppression Without Skills No child is ever asked to simply “hold in” tics — suppression without CBIT’s actual techniques increases distress. Competing-response skills are taught; willpower is never assigned.
  • Always Screening the Companions Because most children with Tourette also carry OCD or ADHD, we screen for both as a standing rule — and treat what we find.
  • Flare Protocols with Dignity Private retreat spaces available whenever tics surge with fatigue or stress, with a quiet return to class or liturgy that never costs the child their place, their part, or an explanation.
  • Medication as Second Line Considered with the consulting neurologist only when CBIT proves insufficient — and reviewed, like all medication, through the stewardship of St. Rita’s.

Regulation Skills & Whole-Team Consistency

Focus: Growing each child’s own regulation literacy — and making sure every adult in their life plays from the same sheet of music.

Components

  • Energy & Arousal Literacy Visual tools that teach children to read their own engine — revved, ready, or running low — and to choose a strategy before an adult has to.
  • Co-Regulation First Adults trained to lend their calm rather than demand the child’s — connection before correction, in every classroom and cottage.
  • Two-Setting Assessment, Ongoing Standardized rating scales (such as the Vanderbilt or Conners) gathered from both classroom and cottage, at baseline and continually — because a profile seen in only one setting is half a child.
  • Medication Partnership For families who choose medication, monthly reviews once stable, coordinated between the prescribing physician, St. Rita’s nursing stewardship, and the adults who see the child daily — dose decisions informed by real days, not office visits.
  • Anxiety & Emotional Care Coordination Where anxiety or emotional struggles co-occur, seamless referral into St. Dymphna’s Youth Therapeutic Wellness Wing — one child, one plan, no seams.

Conditions We Care For at St. Aloysius’

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Condition Summary: A neurodivergent profile marked by ongoing patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity that impact daily task execution.

Care & Treatment: The full clinical guideline model: behavioral supports embedded in every day, organizational-skills training, task-chunking, daily report cards — and medication for ages six and up where families and physicians choose it, reviewed monthly once stable.

At St. Margaret’s, we expand this by incorporating standing desks, wobble stools, and stability balls into classroom layouts; building scheduled physical movement and “heavy work” breaks into every academic hour, always placed before academic blocks; and breaking larger projects into visual, manageable micro-tasks with immediate positive reinforcement. Movement is never taken away as punishment — removing recess for unfinished work removes the medicine because the symptom appeared.

Tourette Syndrome & Chronic Tic Disorders

Condition Summary: A neurological condition characterized by sudden, repetitive, involuntary movements and vocal sounds known as tics — most often accompanied by OCD or ADHD, for which we always screen.

Care & Treatment: CBIT — Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics, the first-line treatment named by the American Academy of Neurology — delivered one-to-one by certified clinicians in the standard course of eight sessions over ten weeks, with boosters as needed and medication considered only if CBIT proves insufficient.

At St. Margaret’s, we expand this by cultivating an absolute zero-judgment culture in which tics are met with quiet acceptance by staff, Sisters, and peers alike; stress-reduction somatic supports; and private retreat spaces available whenever tics flare with fatigue — with a quiet return to liturgy or class that never costs a child their place. We never ask a child to simply suppress tics without CBIT’s actual techniques, because suppression without training increases distress.

The Christ’s Most Innocent Initiative

All twelve programmes