Papered on the walls of Buffalo Community Middle School in 2003, signs advertised a common phrase: “It’s easier to KEEP UP than CATCH UP!”
Though meant to be inspired, biology teacher Lindy Jensen would walk past the flyers as a sixth-grade student and feel a deep sense of hopelessness. Her strategy for “barely” surviving middle school was to procrastinate assignments, then play catch-up at the end of the year, and face a daunting mountain of work at the end of each semester.
As a student, Jensen lacked institutional guidance or appropriate accommodations to manage her ADHD. Now, as an educator and the faculty co-advisor of Nueva’s Neurodiversity Affinity Group, Jensen hopes that neurodivergent students today will not similarly struggle with piles of schoolwork.
A recent development to Nueva’s learning plans aims to prevent and address unsupportive educational experiences like Jensen’s. Since August, Nueva’s Upper School learning support team has implemented a revised policy for providing extended time to students with learning accommodations: now, students must turn in their work within a week after the deadline of any given project. If a student passes the one-week mark, they will have a conversation with their teacher and the learning support team.
Before this change, students with learning plans—who make up 28% of the school’s 450 students—had time-and-a-half for both in-class and homework assignments. For example, a student with a learning plan would have three weeks to complete an essay normally assigned over two weeks. However, the policy proved unsustainable: both teachers and students often struggled to determine amended deadlines, and neurodivergent students often missed critical scaffolding checkpoints.
“In practice, we were all spinning plates and scrambling to keep up,” explained Upper School Academic Support Coach Gretchen Kellough, who spearheaded the new policy and is one-half of the learning support team.
After serving in both faculty and support roles at Nueva for 10 years, Kellough noticed that procrastination often manifested into overdue assignments stacking up at the end of an academic semester. Many students with learning plans were racing toward burnout on a “perpetual hamster wheel”—the exact problem Jensen once faced.
Kellough sought a better system. After communicating with 10 local independent schools, as well as talking with specialists at Stanford University’s Office of Accessible Education, she discovered that no comparable school gives students more than one week of extended time. “No one else was doing it like us—at all,” Kellough said.
So, in the spring of 2025, she presented an idea to the Academic Council: a new homework policy that standardized extended time to one week, among other strategies to support students’ executive functioning and metacognition. Her colleagues appreciated the new policy’s clarity and were widely supportive.
“It makes me feel good that Gretchen works so hard to support students,” Jensen said, adding that neurodivergent students cannot always take on the role of being disability advocates and still have enough time to pursue their own academic passions. She also specifically appreciated that the new system refers students to the learning support team if an extension beyond one week is needed.
For students like Anya O. ’26, the revised one-week deadline structure has helped school feel more manageable. Anya, who has a learning plan for her mental health and ADHD, has found the consistency to be grounding. “I’ve been using this week for almost every assignment,” she said. Even if Anya does not use all seven days, the extended time is always helpful. “I tell myself that I’ll have that time to do it,” Anya shared.
The new structure has also supported Aurelia F. ’27, who received a learning plan for the first time this fall. Though she sometimes used to burn the midnight oil, Aurelia now uses the extra week to plan tutorials and to put into practice her executive function skills.
Aurelia also appreciated that the standardized extended time would support teachers’ planning. Still, Aurelia wished the policy’s development process was more inclusive and “in conversation with the kids.”
Pearl Y.-L. ’26 worried that the one-week window overlooks a deeper challenge many neurodivergent students face. “The problem isn’t that we have too much time,” Pearl said. “We’re struggling with scaffolding the time or getting unstuck.” Pearl remembers her own experience from middle school, when a part of her depression stemmed from frustration of being unable to motivate herself and begin working.
Acknowledging Pearl’s concern, Lead Learning Specialist Cathy Robinson highlighted that the policy is not completely insensitive or inflexible. “Deadline extensions of up to one week may be granted for assignments for students with approved learning plans,” Robinson said. “Additional extensions may be considered based on individual circumstances and are subject to approval on a case-by-case basis.”
Some students in the Neurodiversity Affinity Group voiced that the change itself was not the problem—but how the policy was communicated. Blue N. ’27 only learned about the one-week cap after his Japanese teacher mentioned it in an email several months into the semester. “I really wish we were notified of this,” he said.
Jensen wasn’t surprised by the uncertainty. Neurodivergent students, she said, often feel “frustrated with systems that affect them deeply but aren’t directly communicated to them”—especially when they are expected to understand and use those systems correctly.
Kellough acknowledged that the rollout was not perfect. But she emphasized that the practice is meant to support student well-being, not restrict it.
And teachers like English teacher Amber Carpenter have already noticed a radical improvement in students’ academic performance. Though Carpenter used to have students compounding overdue assignments, she has not yet had a single student turn in work after the one week of extended time.
Hopefully, teachers will be less often “scrambling after students for missing work,” Kellough explained. The learning support team hopes that no one reaches December feeling buried under a mountain of essays and projects.
Kellough expanded, saying that the change was designed with care and long-term well-being in mind—for teachers, but primarily for students. She hopes that the community sees how much the policy was “crafted with intentionality” to enhance extended time, a key accommodation for neurodiverse students.
Pearl, as lead of the Neurodiversity Affinity Group, had one message for her peers about extended time and other accommodations: unlike she used to personally believe, accommodations are neither cheating nor a “privilege”—rather, a right for those who need them.
