The Sage School of Dallas opened its doors in August 2025 with four rooms, four students, and a mission to serve gifted learners with social-emotional, executive functioning, or sensory challenges who are left behind in traditional settings.
One year later, the school is educating 11 sixth through 10th graders in a newly renovated space at King of Glory Lutheran Church, where it is looking forward to even more growth.
“We have a new student who had to miss school last Friday, and he was upset about missing school for the first time in his life,” said Jessica Rall, one of the school’s co-founders and CEO. “It’s walking through those doors and being understood and accepted that lets them take a breath and start to really learn.”
The Sage School is unique in DFW private schools — and rare nationwide — in serving twice-exceptional (2e) students, who make up about 6% of kindergarten through 12th graders. In traditional schools, gifted programs neglect their needs, while support programs fail to challenge them.
Over the past year, Rall and fellow co-founders Kristen Dauphinais and Dr. Mandi Skerbetz have refined and expanded their working vision of a supportive community of personalized learning, real-world skills, and advocacy and awareness.
“When you look at a lot of these children, they need the support on social-emotional, they need to be bumping around in the world, learning those skills,” said UP mom Dauphinais, whose son is neurodiverse. “They need to learn how to build the executive function skills. They’re not going to get that with one-on-one tutoring or online schools.”
Dauphinais explained that the vision for The Sage School came from a desire to better educate children like her son, who are both academically gifted and neurodiverse.
“We all were kind of sitting around, saying, ‘Somebody should,’ and we said that enough times that we looked in the mirror and said, ‘Alright, I guess that’s us,’” she explained.
The Sage School opened with an initial capacity of 10 children per grade. Dauphinais looks forward to possibly doubling grade classes with a goal of growing to 160 students. The broad and purposeful curriculum includes math, science, humanities, languages, electives, and topic-driven innovative-thinking Fridays. Flexible rolling admissions help families in school emergencies finally find the right fit for their child.
“We’ve had students that have gone away before to boarding school for the level of support that we can offer here,” Rall added. “We have families that are so thankful that their children are home and able to go to a school locally that can support them.”
“There’s so much in the news about how the rates of ADHD and autism are skyrocketing,” Dauphinais noted. “It’s just the recognition and the testing around those diagnoses have gotten so much better and so much richer.”
And yet, there is still a lot to learn, as much confusion, misunderstanding, and even misdiagnoses still exist.
“These truly are some of the most brilliant minds out there. Yet, they also have support needs, so it makes it challenging them for them to be in a traditional private or public school,” Dauphinais said. “They are incredibly capable, and they are incredibly talented. Our cornerstone has always been preparing these children for life.”
Author
Josh Hickman
Josh Hickman is a national award-winning journalist, visual artist, sometime musician, and author of seven books. His writing For People Newspapers often focuses on arts & culture, local small businesses, local history & government, and interesting personal stories. His paintings include a commission for Dallas County and a donation to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
