Most schools are built to sort kids into one track or another — and twice-exceptional kids don’t sort neatly into either one. A gifted program sees the brilliance and misses the struggle. A learning support program sees the struggle and misses the brilliance. Often, the two mask each other entirely: a school looking for a learning difference doesn’t think to look for giftedness, and a school looking for giftedness doesn’t think to look for what’s underneath it. As one Sage family put it: “Gifted masks disability — disability masks gifted.”
At Sage, we built our approach around seeing the whole student, all at once. That means:
- Intellectual rigor — a college-prep curriculum that challenges the top 2% of intellectual potential, because these kids deserve to be pushed.
- Targeted social-emotional learning — woven into every hour to build resilience and self-awareness.
- Executive functioning support — the bridge between brilliant ideas and the organized output it takes to get them onto paper, into a project, or through a deadline.
- Intentional community — a place where students and families find people who understand them, without having to explain themselves first.
At Sage, being twice-exceptional isn’t a challenge to be managed. It’s a potential to be unlocked.
Twice-exceptional, or “2e,” students are both intellectually gifted and neurodivergent — kids who might have an extraordinary gift for pattern recognition or spatial reasoning, alongside ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or another learning difference. These are some of the brightest, most creative kids in our schools. And for a long time, they had nowhere to go.
Gifted programs weren’t built to support their social and emotional needs. Learning difference schools weren’t built to challenge them academically. So families were stuck choosing one or the other — challenge or support — when their child needed both, at the same time, from people who understood how to give it to them.
We estimate there are roughly 50,000 of these students in North Texas alone. Before Sage, there wasn’t a single college-prep school in Texas designed specifically for them.
We started Sage because that gap shouldn’t exist. No family should have to choose between a school that sees their child’s brilliance and one that supports their needs.
Sage was founded by three women who saw the same gap from three different angles — as parents, and as educators.
Two of our co-founders, Jessica Rall and Kristen Dauphinais, are parents of twice-exceptional children. They know firsthand what it feels like to watch a bright, capable kid struggle in a school that wasn’t built for how their mind actually works. Our third co-founder, Dr. Mandi Skerbetz, has spent over twenty years as a special education and gifted teacher, and for just as long she dreamed of leading a school where a student’s strengths came first — not their struggles.
That’s the school they built.
Two things tend to surprise families most once they’re inside the Sage community:
How much their child opens up. Many students arrive having spent years feeling like they had to hide part of themselves — either masking a struggle to seem more “typical,” or dialing down their intensity to fit in socially. Parents are often surprised by how quickly that guardedness starts to soften once their child realizes they don’t have to do that here.
How hands-on and real the learning is. Sage leans heavily into project-based, experiential learning — things like independent research, creative technology projects, and market-based learning that mirrors real-world skills. Families used to a more traditional, worksheet-and-lecture model are often surprised by how much their child lights up when learning looks like doing instead of just listening.
The word that comes up again and again is belonging. Parents tell us their child feels truly understood at Sage — often for the first time. They talk about a school culture that’s warm, accepting, and genuinely built around who their child is, not who a typical curriculum expects them to be.
They also tell us they can feel the balance working. Their child is being challenged academically and supported emotionally, at the same time, without one getting sacrificed for the other. And they consistently point to the sense of community — the relationships with teachers, the connections with other families who get it — as something that changed how their whole family experiences school.
