VPerspective

Pilot DOE autism program can work for all CTT classes

by Carmen Alvarez

May 22, 2008 1:37 PM

Not long ago, the neurological disorder known as autism was poorly understood, often confused with mental illness, and maltreated, leaving autistic children and adults viewed as having a life sentence. One Brooklyn parent of a child with autism wasn’t satisfied that her son would have to grow up to be a dependent adult and she did something about it.

Dorothy Siegel became an expert on the condition, an advocate for those affected and the architect of an organic approach to dealing with autism that is now used in a number of public schools. Today, her son is a newly minted college graduate (NYU, with a linguistics major), and his mother can look back on a legacy that includes not just helping her own child, but kick-starting successful educational programs in the city’s schools that are making a difference in the lives of hundreds of kids.

Looking closely at that organic approach, after a visit to one of the schools that is doing wonders for its affected students, I recognized the inescapable. The structural template governing how support is administered — and I’ll talk more about the specifics below — applies not only to programs serving children with autism but should frame every collaborative team teaching program in the city.

What Siegel created is just that good!

Autism, as described by the advocacy group Autism Speaks, is “a complex neurobiological disorder that impairs, often severely, a person’s ability to communicate, respond to surroundings and form relationships with others. It is also associated with rigid and repetitive behaviors that typically last throughout a person’s lifetime. It is not a mental illness, but part of a group of disorders known as Autism Spectrum Disorders (or ASD). Today, one in 150 individuals is diagnosed with autism, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined.”

There are no known causes for autism, either genetic or environmental, nor proven “cures.” But there are educational and therapeutic interventions that can dramatically improve outcomes. And they can take place in the public schools, especially when parents and teachers advocate strongly.

Siegel, a senior project director at NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy, proved that the public schools can produce great results for students with disabilities. Under the guidance of Prof. Shirley Cohen of Hunter College, an expert on autism, Siegel collaborated with then-District 15 Superintendent Carmen Fariña and other special education leaders in the Central Brooklyn district to pioneer the ASD Nest Program in that district’s PS 32, which began in September 2003. The program now operates in 13 schools in the five boroughs, including a middle school and a high school.

I visited one of those schools — PS 112 in East Harlem — a pre-K-2 school where more than three in 10 children have IEPs, but where all the children, not just those with disabilities, receive the same small-class instruction and are held to the same high academic expectations.

“The ASD Nest Program is a therapeutic program with academic rigor,” said Eileen Reiter, the school principal and a strong supporter and practitioner of the program. “Our entire school benefits from having this program.”

A sign on her office wall reads, “A school is judged not by the way it treats its most successful learners, but by the way it takes care of its struggling learners.”

The UFT has always believed that the attitude of a school leader, and not only its teachers, is key to helping students negotiate their disabilities so they can function in an inclusive school environment. At PS 112, we saw such a program in action, one that organically combines real collaborative leadership, teacher training, team teaching, small classes and a full toolkit of strategies and therapies for sensory, motor, language and social interaction difficulties in a fully inclusive environment.

The ASD Nest Program also features weekly team meetings, where the principal, teachers, therapists and a social worker “case conference” individual students to refine their educational and therapeutic approach. There are also home visits by the social worker to see the child in his or her home environment and bring the parents’ point of view to the team. The social worker convenes monthly parent meetings to help them understand how to help their child at home and to bring many of the strategies used at school into the home. Because many families feel overwhelmed, the social worker also tries to connect families with outside social service providers and with sources of information and support.

The classrooms look like any well-stocked mainstream classroom, but are designed to minimize distractions for children for whom distractibility is a common problem.

The program even provides some things that are new to me, such as the Incredible Five-Point Scale, which helps children gauge how loudly they are speaking, and then learn how to modulate their voice volume so it is appropriate for different situations.

Everything I saw in these rooms was visual or tactile and explicit, all to maintain the children’s focus and ensure understanding. The children even follow an illustrated list of the “Magic Five” behaviors, among them: “Sit like a pretzel.”

Teachers also learn how to effectively handle children’s challenging behaviors. For example, one child liked to “skywrite.” Rather than forbidding this activity, the staff developed an ingenious system that permits the child to skywrite for a brief period for a limited number of times during the day. In the course of several weeks, the boy stopped skywriting.

The program has the enthusiastic support of the Office of Special Education Initiatives of the Department of Education. In this case, the DOE does not stint on resources, and Siegel — herself a strong progressive education activist — praised the office’s cooperation and support.

“So what’s the secret?” Siegel was asked. “It’s teacher training. A collaborative transdisciplinary approach. A tool kit of educational and therapeutic strategies. A strong home-school connection. Weekly team meetings. Support for teachers in the classroom. Targeted professional development. Intervisitations. Any one of these things won’t necessarily work in isolation, but together, they’re a package that does work.

“We look at the child with autism, design a program that fits his or her needs, and then work to make sure that all the essential components are in place.”

Key for teachers in setting up children for success and not failure is professional development. “We’ve got to bring expertise to the teacher,” Siegel says.

Teachers and therapists are thus provided with seven credits of training at Hunter College. All staff receive 60 hours of per-session per year to attend the team meetings and some professional development activities.

Teachers are chosen for their commitment to teach in this particular program. “Kids are kids. We do our best with all of them,” says Reiter, “and if you can’t work in this kind of school, you’ve got to think about whether you want to be here, because every teacher in every class will have ‘difficult’ kids.”

Special education teacher Debbie Malmet attests to the success of the organic system. Looking out at the industrious class of kindergarteners working collaboratively or reading on their own, she said, “You should have seen them at the beginning of the year.”

Siegel believes that the program can and should be duplicated citywide, and that the approach could work with children with a wide variety of disabilities. I’ll go even further: The keys to this program — the teacher training, the collaborative team teaching, the team meetings, the enriched resources, the visits to families, the targeted use of therapies — can and should be used in collaborative team-teaching classrooms citywide. It’s a template just waiting to be applied.

“By design, this program costs no more than what the DOE is currently spending for similar children, with mixed results. But this kind of successful program can’t be done on the cheap. And you’ve got to get them early,” Siegel insisted.

Amen to that.

For information about autism, go to www.autismspeaks.org. The DOE’s description of the ASD Nest Program can be found at http://schools.nyc.gov.

A June 22 “New York City Walk Now for Autism” event, whose proceeds will fund research into the causes of autism, kicks off from the South Street Seaport. Details are at www.walknowforautism.org.