Children with autism require special attention that most schools don’t know how to give. Vista Outreach Services provides guidance to school teachers and staff—as well as students—to reach a positive trajectory of the student’s social, intellectual, and emotional health.
Even if your school district already has autism support in place, Outreach offers consultative services where an expert in the field can assess the school’s existing program. This process serves to commend successes and identify areas of improvement. The goal is to provide students with autism with the best possible program and facilities that are designed to foster growth and progress.
With the growing autism population, many school districts are opening autism support classrooms of their own. Whether the district decides to run an all-purpose or Competent Learner Model classroom, Vista’s Outreach professionals assist districts in designing a district-run autism support classroom. We can assist personnel in setting up the physical structure of the classroom. Once the classroom is established, we continue consulting to the classroom throughout the year regarding grouping students, planning lessons for individuals and groups, and managing student behavior.
Vista’s Outreach professionals consult to the IEP teams regarding instructional strategies, adaptations to improve student performance, generalization, and maintenance. We provide guided practice for different instructional strategies and behavior support plans to the IEP team. Vista’s Outreach professionals assist teachers in ordering the right materials or creating materials to meet student needs. Additionally, we assist the IEP team in determining items and activities that can function as reinforcement and how to use them contingently to maximize student performance. We help teams understand how autism spectrum disorders affect participation within educational and community settings.
Vista’s Outreach professionals instruct the IEP team in data collection methods in order to make analysis optimally useful. Vista knows that more direct data measures and more precisely defined behaviors of interest, the better the information collected. We also know that resources available in public school settings may not always lend themselves to follow the best guidelines. We work with each team to determine the best data measure with the resources available to the team. The data collected is analyzed to determine future needs for intervention and then presented in visual displays to make it understandable to all team members.
Vista’s Outreach professionals design appropriate data collection methods and when available, train IEP team members to collect data. We collect and analyze functional assessment data to determine why contextually inappropriate behaviors are occurring. Behavior plans are design with the IEP team based on this data driven functional assessment. Intervention techniques required to implement the behavior plan are demonstrated by Vista’s Outreach professionals and feedback is provided to staff implementing the plan.
Vista’s Outreach professionals assist staff in preparing for the IEP process by determining present levels of education, strengths and needs and based on that information, generate goals and objectives and specially designed instruction. We participate in the IEP process and attend parent conferences, team meetings, and IEP meetings at the IEP teams’ request.
Outreach provides expert behavioral support to school districts and educators to help guide them through the intensive and complex needs of students.