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Students from the International Brain Institute, or iBRAIN — a special school with a main campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and a new location in Sunrise Park — kicked off New York Fashion Week last week with the iCAN Do Anything fashion show. Taking it to the runway with a design made with each student.
“The idea came from the whole, fair, whole mindset of our staff and our families and our kids. Kids can’t and won’t,” said Patrick Donahue, founder of iBRAIN. “Being in New York, the epicenter of fashion, it seemed like a natural next step to let our kids showcase and be the best models of the day.”
Donahue founded iBRAIN’s first location in 2013 on the Upper West Side. His daughter Sarah Jane, now 17, has been left with severe brain damage nine years after being shaken by a nurse at Lennox Hill Hospital days after she was born. The Sunset Park campus opened last spring. The school offers small class sizes, one-on-one support and lesson plans, and a range of supportive services and therapies for students and their families.
The school partnered with local fashion designer Jeffrey Ampratham, whose team worked with each student to create clothes that fit their likes and needs – many of the students models in iBRAIN use mobile devices or other assistive technology and wanted clothes that worked. It is not against their technology. Students, accompanied by friends, family members or volunteer professional models, walked the runway in brightly colored dresses, patterned robes and classic varsity-style jackets.
“It was a magical night,” Donahue said.
“To see the pride of the kids, some of them walking down the runway, some of them being escorted down the runway in chairs… The smiles and the pride they had, and the families and the audience, that was it. It’s just a magical night,” he said.
The show of September 8 was the first time of iBRAIN to the world of fashion, but certainly not the last.
“We’re going to make this an annual event, and the plan for next year is to coordinate and partner with different fashion houses in the New York area so they can personally work with each student,” Donahue said. “One student might have Ralph Lauren clothing designed with that fashion house, and another might have Perry Ellis, Nicole Miller, and so on and so forth.”
A fashion show followed by a cocktail hour and silent auction raised around $100,000 for the school and a new project – the iBRAIN Fashion Lab. The lab will be focused on next year’s fashion show, Donahue said, and looking to collaborate with different manufacturers and designers about changing the fashion industry as a whole, so we can design more accessible designs for these very unique garments. individuals”
Some iBRAIN students have G-tubes, Donahue explained, or wear braces on their legs and feet, or have motor skills that make it difficult to interact with normal buttons and other attachments. Most clothing brands do not incorporate those needs into their designs.
“There are things out there, but our goal is to build. [the lab] It’s more accessible clothing and this accessible clothing is really accessible,” Donahue said.
The Fashion Lab will be the newest addition to iBRAIN’s comprehensive programs. Each student works closely with a professional and receives different treatments based on their needs, Donahue said. With extended school days and school years, it all adds up to $200,000 worth of services each year — but iBRAIN families pay none of it.
Special education and programs are expensive and often out of reach for students who need them, Donahue said, and parents have to sue the city’s education department to make sure public schools aren’t good enough for their children. The department. To help, iBRAIN has established a non-profit law firm that takes care of each student’s case pro-bono, and the school freezes payments until parents can return their money and pay their fees.
“The only out-of-pocket cost to enroll in our program is a $100 refundable deposit,” Donahue said. “Then we freeze all payments while the lawyers do their thing. This is my core philosophy, that a family’s socioeconomic status should have no bearing on their access to a free and appropriate education.
It’s an imperfect system, but in practice, asking already struggling public schools to take on such special-needs students wouldn’t be fair, Donahue said, and it wouldn’t be fair to the students.
“With our kids, especially the ones we’re serving right now with severe disabilities … the biggest rehabilitation system for kids is really not the medical system, but the education system,” he said. “You can have a child who spends a month, three months, in a medical facility, if they have good insurance, they can recover. But they’re transitioned into the community and basically transitioned into the school system.”
The new Sunset Park location had a light launch in the spring to “work out the kinks,” Donahue said, but enrollment is now open and rolling — students can start at any time, not just at the beginning of the school year. He emphasized that any Brooklyn family interested in the school can have their child evaluated for free to see if iBRAIN would be a good fit.
“Not only is there no cost to attend, but there is no cost to assess whether it is valid,” he said. “I recommend that people go to the website or call and make an appointment or visit.”
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