 Barbara Arrowsmith Young and her then-husband, Joshua Cohen founded the original Toronto school in 1980 to teach learning disabled children using the program and exercises that Arrowsmith Young had begun devising for herself in 1978 and which she claimed enabled her to overcome her own severe learning difficulties.The original school was housed in a rented building on Yorkville Ave.According to Arrowsmith Young's autobiographical account in her 2012 book, "The Woman Who Changed Her Brain", she used her middle name for the school in honor of her paternal grandmother (born Louie May Arrowsmith in 1883), who as a young girl had been one of the pioneer settlers of Creston, British Columbia.