Most of us could attach a file to an email in our sleep. But for a person with special needs, that seemingly simple action can be a Herculean task. That’s why special education teacher Michele McKeone created Autism Expressed, a first-of-its-kind online learning program that teaches digital skills to adolescents with autism and other developmental disabilities, TakePart reports.
The program, which just launched last summer, is already being used by thousands of students in public and private schools and in many homes. As TakePart notes, autism is one of the fastest growing developmental disabilities, and about 1 in 88 children fall somewhere on the spectrum. Worryingly, the U.S. Department of Labor found that people with disabilities are unemployed at a rate of 14.3 percent, while the unemployment rate of people without disabilities is a drastically lower 6.8 percent.
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To help close this gap, Autism Expressed teaches its students the web skills many of us may take for granted, such as online etiquette, coding, building web portfolios, and attaching resumes and cover letters to applications.
“Today the ability to email, social network, and simply navigate the Web are essential life skills,” McKeone told TakePart. “Most of us have learned these skills through our work, friends and family, or by sitting down in front of computer and exploring. For our students with developmental disabilities, this is not always the case, due to their need for a specialized approached to their learning.”
While a single start-up won’t level the completely playing field for every person that is afflicted with autism, it does provide them a path to increased employment opportunities. And in this country — the land of opportunity — isn’t that a great place to start?
Tag: autism
This Special Comic Book Makes Autistic Kids Feel Like Superheroes
Most comic books follow a classic formula. There’s the superheroes, the villians, and of course, the epic battles of good versus evil. But Face Value comics deviates from that a little bit by featuring Michael, the series’ fearless leader who has autism.
These original comics were created by Pennsylvania-based mental health professional Dave Kot, who is autistic himself. His aim for the series? To not only help shift public perception about the disorder, but also to provide kids on the spectrum with a hero they can relate to. In the story, Michael struggles with being accepted in school, as well as other challenges that superheroes face—you know, like intergalactic invasions. In fact, in a video published on TruthAtlas, Kot explains that his favorite scene in the series is where Michael gets ready to walk into his first day of school. The page is printed upside down—but it’s not a mistake. “It might appear that Michael is upside down. He kind of is. But it was done intentionally,” Kot says. “Readers have to literally change their perspective to look at a person with autism differently than they may have expected. And that’s the point of what we’re doing with the comic book.”
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The comic’s illustrations are unique in that they focus closely on the characters’ facial expressions as a way to help readers better understand how autistic individuals respond to certain situations. “Freeze-framing a facial feature allows a reader to understand what the facial feature looks like, and that’s one level of what we’re doing with the comic book,” Kot says. “The second level uses speech bubbles to give language to what that feeling is. So you actually begin to understand, when a character says, “I’m angry,” and then you can begin to match up that language to the facial expression. The entire story helps place the situation in context, on what maybe made them angry, and what that looks like… That helps build empathy.”
Right now, Face Value comics are sold in a few independent comic books stores in central Pennsylvania. The first issue can also be digitally downloaded or ordered online. So far, the reception has been extremely positive, with Kot saying that the first run of 100 comics sold out in just a few days, right around Christmas. In-stores sales are also strong, and Kot says he’s received fan mail from people around the world. “We’re just one voice,” Kot says. “But it’s one voice that isn’t being heard in the comic book market, and it’s one voice not being heard in a lot of social advocacy. And this sets up a dialogue to be able to talk about what autism is, and what it isn’t.”
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The Farm That Could Change Autism Treatment Forever
By age 14, Billy Nacmias had become obese, obstinate and prone to such violent outbursts that he pushed a teacher down a flight of stairs and was expelled from school.
Billy has autism, but he had not always been so contentious. His behavior had grown increasingly unstable in recent years, after being physically beaten by another teacher at his Queens, N.Y., school. He began overeating and acting out. He became easily enraged and went on binges destroying his family’s home. Billy’s parents sued the city school district after their son’s maltreatment, and as part of their settlement, they were offered their choice of institutions, on the government’s dime, to help him.
Their choices were limited: Most residential treatment centers are state-run forensic psych facilities — sometimes referred to as “lock-ins,” because residents are locked inside the premises. The Nacmiases were reluctant to confine their young son to such an institution. They had one other option: a different kind of facility, called The Center for Discovery, about 100 miles away, in Monticello, N.Y. The private not-for-profit is the largest residential treatment center of its kind in New York State, reserved for the care and treatment of those with significant disabilities, complex medical conditions and autism spectrum disorders.
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The Center, located in the Catskill Mountains, feels more like a utopia than it does a last resort. On a bright morning in early fall, the campus had the air of a tony New England prep school or a mountaintop yoga retreat — not, God forbid, an institution. Spread out over three campuses and 1,500 acres of rolling hills wound with walkways and lovingly tended gardens, the facility abounds with horses, pigs, chickens and cows. The on-site cafe serves freshly baked goods made from hyperlocal organic ingredients and offers an array of nut-based milks. Students here — some 400 adults and children with significant physical or developmental disabilities — feed the farm animals as well as the rabbits, rascal ferrets, snakes and frogs that live in the Center’s “Imaginarium.” Residents also work the farm, swim in the therapeutic pool, play fantasy football in the “Learning Center,” and volunteer at the nearby fire department. In the winter, they zip special coats around their wheelchairs so they can still go outside safely.
The activities are essential to The Center’s holistic — or “offbeat,” as Patrick Dollard, The Center’s boisterous president and CEO, puts it — approach to treatment. While the medical establishment tends to adhere to a “broken brain” theory of developmental disability, which focuses primarily on neurological problems and behavior-based therapies, the Monticello center aims to treat the entire individual. The idea is that a person’s physical, emotional and psychological health, along with his or her environment, are one interconnected whole. At The Center for Discovery, buildings conform to strict eco-friendly regulations, and the residents’ diets are stripped of artificial dyes, flavorings and preservatives. Outdoor and indoor environments, including those that foster interaction with animals, are specifically designed to promote learning and calmness by decreasing children’s stress responses. Kids eat healthily, exercise and are, above all, encouraged to express themselves and to be happy.
The place is so quiet, calm and bright that it’s hard to believe it is a counterpart to the traditional psychiatric treatment center, or lock-in. That phrase carries especially dark connotations in New York State, where conditions at such facilities as the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island were so egregious — among the offenses were overcrowding, sexual abuse and unethical medical studies — that they spawned a federal investigation and civil rights legislation protecting the rights of the disabled. (The Center for Discovery took in some of Willowbrook’s residents when the notorious facility closed in 1987.)
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Billy arrived at The Center in 2012. At the time, he would eat only pizza and blocks of mozzarella cheese, and he required two full-time aides trained in special tactics to keep him from injuring himself or his helpers. In videos taken during those early days, he angrily pushes away a plate of organic fish and rice, demanding pizza again and again, pounding his hands on the table. On a walk, he attempts to grab one of the aides and shove him forcefully.
Less than a year later, videos show a boy transformed. He lost 60 pounds; he looks years younger. He came around to organic food. He lists his favorite chores out loud, with a new spark in his eye and color in his cheeks. His incessant demands for junk food have been replaced by an exuberant enumeration of his favorite activities: “Cooking, zoo jobs, feeding the rabbits and Zumba!” he says.
Billy is, by all appearances, a far healthier kid. He is one of The Center’s most recent success stories, but the path of his evolution is not uncommon. Dollard says he’s spent the last three decades witnessing similar transformations. “If you create a safe environment, good things happen. They grow. They get better. They get more confident. I’ve seen it happen,” Dollard says. “I’ll have somebody I’ve known for 20 years, and I see them and suddenly they’re better and I say, ‘Wow! I wish I could prove that!’”
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What Dollard means is that he wishes he had the hard data to show that The Center’s treatment strategies result in improvements in health: lower anxiety, a healthier immune system and less frequent bouts of rage. And for the last year and a half, The Center has been working to collect that data. With a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation and in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, Harvard University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, The Center has been collaborating on formal research on autism treatment.
The nucleus of The Center’s research efforts resides in its Big Barn Discovery School, the first residential campus in New York State specifically designed for students with autism spectrum disorders. As its name suggests, the school is housed in and adjacent to a converted barn — once a large dairy farm that sent products to New York City — located on a chunk of land that The Center bought nearly a decade ago in neighboring Hurleyville, N.Y. The barn itself is surrounded by chicken coops built into old, multicolored gypsy wagons. Kids gather 200 eggs a day from the coops, which are then distributed to the on-site dining areas and also handed out to neighboring community members as part of The Center’s agriculture program. Within the barn are performance and event spaces, which host proms and graduations, and this spring, a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Down a long wing are a series of classrooms outfitted with state-of-the-art technology — cameras, computers and biometric sensors — to monitor and measure virtually everything that goes on with each student within each room. Researchers are interested in studying how children with autism interact and respond to their environment; they’re also looking for the potential triggers of kids’ agitation and dysfunctional behaviors. For example, what are the conditions — both internally and externally — before, during and after an outburst? Are they correlative or is there something more subtle at play?
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At the end of the hall in the wing is the laboratory space, where data on physiological responses are gathered. Here, technicians and doctors monitor and record in-the-moment health measures such as heart rate and electrodermal activity via wearable sensors like wristbands. Researchers also track longer-term indicators of overall health, including the time of the student’s last bowel movement, hours of nightly sleep, food and liquid intake, exercise and duration. Using these data from the classrooms and lab, the consortium of researchers are hoping to quantify exactly how children with autism are responding to The Center’s interventions.
“All of these perspectives working collectively in this space — that’s how we’re going to have potential to have a substantive impact on public health,” says Lisa A. Marsch, director of the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth College.
The latest numbers suggest that the target population is growing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that roughly 1 in 88 American children now have an autism spectrum disorder, up from 1 in 500 in 1995. Today, at The Center for Discovery, 60 percent of the residents comprise children with autism spectrum disorders, up from 40 percent just five years ago.
Ultimately, the impact of the research being done at The Center could extend beyond autism, and there is hope that this holistic approach could be applicable to age-related illnesses like dementia as well. The end goal, however — Dollard and others’ version of utopia — is to render facilities like this one unnecessary. With the right treatment and assistance, they say, people with disabilities may be able to live full lives in their own communities. “We want to eradicate the need for residential care altogether,” explains The Center’s associate executive director, Terry Hamlin, with a smile. “So that no one is locked away.”
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Correction: February 20, 2014
This article has been amended throughout to correct several small errors of fact.
A Dog Trained By a Prisoner Helps an Autistic Boy Learn to Hug His Mom Again
Susy Tucker’s 11-year-old son Zach has Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning type of autism that leaves him with plenty of challenges. The Colorado Springs boy had trouble relating to others, and stopped letting his parents hug him at age 5. Zach fell behind in school, and was becoming more isolated when his parents sought help from an innovative program.
Christopher Vogt is an inmate at the Trinidad Correctional Facility in southern Colorado, convicted for second-degree murder. While Vogt served his 48-year term, he began learning how to train service dogs through the Prison Trained K-9 Companion program. After a decade of practice, Vogt became so skilled at teaching the animals that prison officials gave him permission to train dogs for kids with autism and other special needs.
Vogt studied books about autism to understand how a dog might help kids with the disorder. Each dog he trains sleeps with him in his cell, and accompanies him while he stands in lines and goes through his daily prison routine. Vogt mimics the behaviors kids with autism might display, and teaches the dogs to gently “nudge” him out of these spells with their noses.
When the Tucker family was looking for help with their son, they learned that trained service dogs can cost $20,000 or more. But the Prison Trained K-9 Companion Program would provide them with a specially-trained dog for only $750, much of which is used to keep the program running. When the Tuckers decided to try a dog trained by Vogt to help their son, Vogt asked them detailed questions about Zach’s behaviors so he could train a dog named Clyde to serve Zach. Then they traveled to a prison in Sterling, Colo. several times so Vogt could teach Zach how to interact with the dog.
Since Zach brought Clyde home in 2011, his transformation has been remarkable. Zach stopped crying for hours every time he went to bed. When he was in third grade, he was working at the kindergarten level. Now he’s caught up to his classmates and is even advanced in math, with the help of Clyde, who accompanies him to school. Zach told Kirk Mitchell of the Denver Post, “Taking care of Clyde was really freaking hard. It’s paying off. He keeps my anxiety down. The focus factor helped.”
Ami Nunn, Zach’s special-education teacher, told Mitchell, “Having Clyde has allowed him to open up to people in a way that I don’t think he would have otherwise. He just has blossomed.”
And Susy Tucker has a prisoner and a special dog to thank for the fact that, after four years of shirking her touch, her son began hugging her again.
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When This Dad Looked at His Autistic Son, He Saw a Business Opportunity Not a Handicap
When David Friedman’s autistic son, Matt, turned 14, the family was faced with a reality check: How would Matt get through high school and find a job that would allow him to support himself? According to Autism Speaks, a national advocacy organization, almost 90% of young adults with autism are currently unemployed. “This represents a vast amount of high-potential human capital, sitting around untapped,” Friedman wrote in an AdAge column. He knew that Matt could thrive in a work environment that supported his (and other autistic adults’) unique talents, such as pattern memory, extreme focus and accuracy. As a corporate executive, Friedman also recognized that some of the most tedious, process-oriented tasks at large companies, such as website maintenance, data entry and software testing, are either outsourced or handled by junior-level employees who find the processes mundane, leading to high turnover rates and drops in quality. But these jobs — with their patterns and details — are perfectly suited for individuals with autism. It was just a matter of connecting the two.
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Friedman left his corporate job and founded AutonomyWorks, an organization that offers its clients a pool of highly trained workers, all with autism spectrum disorder, who can perform these process tasks with the utmost precision. AutonomyWorks takes a job, breaks it into clearly defined tasks and assigns it to one of their associates, who completes them, while adhering to quality control monitors. These associates work in an office environment that is crafted to suit their needs. Each worker also receives occupational therapy, job coaching and life skills training in the workplace, so as to make them as successful as possible in their new careers.
Since launching in 2012, AutonomyWorks now employs 15 people (11 with autism and four managers). By the end of 2015, the organization hopes to have completed a service center in Chicago that would employ 300 associates, giving that many more young adults with autism an opportunity to thrive on their own.
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This Non-Profit Thinks Autistic Kids Should Be Able to Enjoy The Same Things As Other Kids
It can be difficult for families with autistic children to enjoy public outings. Strangers sometimes find their behavior distracting or disruptive. But the Theater Development Fund wanted to help these families enjoy live theater, so the nonprofit organized four Broadway productions a year for people who need a little more understanding and a little less stimulation. In November the organization invited families to a special production of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” where ushers handed out squeeze balls to help autistic kids relax. The producers turned the volume down by twenty percent and eliminated strobe lights because autistic people can be sensitive to loud noises and bright lights. In the lobby, experienced volunteers staffed break rooms and quiet areas where theater patrons could take a break whenever the stimulation became too intense in the packed house. The idea of making theater accessible to all people is taking hold off Broadway too—for example, the Lone Tree Arts Center near Denver recently staged a “sensory-friendly” performance of its holiday show. These programs join sensory-friendly movie screenings and restaurant nights in helping families struggling with Autism to enjoy themselves outside their homes.
Meet Brad, an Autistic 25-Year-Old Who Wants to Build Your Furniture
If you’ve ever struggled to put together an IKEA dresser without wanting to commit hara-kiri with a screwdriver (and who hasn’t?), Brad has a solution — let him build it instead. Brad, who lives in Edmonton, Canada, is a 25-year-old with autism. He can’t read or speak, so he uses simple sign language to communicate. And he builds. For years, Brad has been building things — from furniture to model planes to interactive toys and more. It’s what he does best. What most people would consider a maddening and painstaking chore, Brad finds fun and easy. He can understand any diagram or blueprint, especially the wordless ones from IKEA, no matter how complicated. So with the help of his dad, Mark, Brad created a new business, Made by Brad; he’ll build any piece of furniture for you. The point is to instill a sense of accomplishment into Brad, and also to prove that people with disabilities are just as capable and dedicated — perhaps more so — as everyone else.
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