Karl Leeuwen – Karl Leeuwen

KARL

LEEUWEN

Developmental Specialist · Vancouver, Canada

On the first day of kindergarten, I kicked my teacher and ran home. She tried to pull me into circle time. I wasn’t having it.

My parents didn’t know what to make of it. Over the next twelve years, they tried everything the system offered. Assessments, tutors, special programs, psychologists, private boarding school after I was kicked out in grade 7, antidepressants by grade 10, then expelled again. They moved on from what didn’t work. They kept looking. They genuinely wanted better for me.

For a while, I got away with it. Ability covered the gaps, and early ability gets a lot of praise. But by grade eight, coasting stops working and the gaps begin to show. A child who has never had to try doesn’t start then — because trying and failing would cost them the one certainty they had. So they find other ways out. I know this particular move from the inside.

Here’s what I watched, in school after school, for over twenty years: a child in trouble becomes the centre of a system built to respond to trouble. Fix this, address that, manage what’s immediately wrong. Every specialist arrives at the crisis point. Every intervention targets the symptom. Nobody is building anything — they’re all firefighting. And the more the system responds, the more it confirms to everyone, including the child, that this child needs more managing, not less.

My parents weren’t wrong to work with the system. It was the only tool available. But something was missing from every one of those rooms, and it was the same thing.

THE WORK

At twenty-two, I walked into my first classroom as a behavioural interventionist. For the next decade, I was called into more than a hundred schools across Vancouver and West Vancouver — almost always as the last resort. After the accommodation plans. After the expert reports. After the previous support workers had come and gone.

Every child I was assigned already knew why I was there. Their parents had told them. Their teacher had told them. The entire room knew. The move that changed everything was simple: I refused to act like it. I walked in and gave my attention to whoever engaged with me. The one who wanted help with something, the one who wanted to show me something, the one who just needed someone to actually listen. No file review first. No accommodation plan followed. No agenda except the room in front of me.

That single shift did something no IEP or stack of paperwork had managed. It showed the child I’d been sent for that the adult in charge wasn’t there to manage them into compliance. The support wasn’t a verdict. I was genuinely there for them.

“Most children don’t lose their way.

They never build it.”

THE ORIGIN

In grade two, I invented a mental exercise I never told anyone about. I’d close my eyes, freeze the moment in time, a real point I could theoretically step back into, and ask: if I’d known then where it was going, what would I have done differently? I’d run it forward. Run it backward. Turn cause and effect over until the shape of it was clear. I did this for years. Nobody showed it to me. I built it alone because I needed it.

What I understand now is what it actually was: a child doing, privately and imperfectly, the thing nobody had built for him. Holding direction. Tracking the gap between where he said he’d be and where he actually was. Letting that gap do the teaching.

That exercise — and a career watching it be absent in child after child — is where The Class Lion came from.

There’s a period, roughly between seven and fourteen, when a child’s real direction is still close to the surface. Before the world has had time to blur the lines. A child in this window often knows things about themselves that adults spend years trying to recover: what genuinely draws them, what they can’t stop doing, what feels true when nobody’s watching. Most people, when they trace it back, find something here — an interest that became an obsession, something they did for no reason except that it mattered.

This window closes. Not suddenly — gradually, and then completely. By twelve or thirteen, the direction has either been building for years or it hasn’t. A parent who waits until the child is visibly off course discovers that the moment when real influence was possible has already passed. Not because they failed — because nobody told them it was happening.

I work with families who sense something real in their child — something the systems around them keep failing to see, or quietly trying to manage away.

What I build is the architecture that gives that something a direction. Not my direction. The child’s. Developed in their own words and choices, over time, with the parent alongside as guide rather than manager.

A child who moves through this work arrives at adulthood with something almost none of their peers will have: a decade of self-authored direction. They know who they are. They know what drives them. They know where they’re pointing. The day they leave school isn’t an ending they’re unprepared for. It’s a starting line they’ve been building toward.

The school will produce a transcript. This produces a person who knows exactly what to do with it.

Not every child needs this approach.

Not every family wants that level of responsibility.

The ones who do already know why.

WHERE IT BEGINS

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