The Phoenix Elementary School District this school year consolidated its autism program onto one campus: Emerson Elementary School, which serves pre-K through eighth grade students, in Phoenix’s Coronado neighborhood near downtown.
The district had a need to “create a core location” for its autism program, said Alicia Zelvis, the district’s student services director. Emerson is a “supportive and peaceful environment” for autistic students, she said, citing the campus’s garden areas.
More than 50 of the school’s 311 students are part of its autism program. In the fall, Emerson is planning to add a seventh autism program classroom for kindergarteners.
“It’s easier to offer more diverse offerings to the kids we serve” with the pooled resources of a consolidated program, said Emerson Principal Nicholas Lodato.
At an April event organized for Autism Awareness Month, students participated in a walk and a ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially launch two new sensory rooms on the campus. The school revamped an existing sensory room and added another. Worksheets filled out by the students in the school’s autism program lined the walls, with information about which sounds, feels and smells they do and don’t like.
The two sensory rooms were paid for with federal pandemic relief funds set aside for education programs for students with disabilities. The rooms “help students with sensory processing disorders develop coping and self-regulation skills to be more successful in the classroom,” according to district records.
“We’re just here to make sure all these kids get the proper services,” said K-3 autism program teacher Richard Nelson, including by providing support with daily living skills, social-emotional skills, communication and academics. “Just making sure we accommodate their needs to help them grow.”
Trees on campus: Trees growing at Emerson Elementary will expand the shade canopy and build community
As part of the school’s Autism Awareness Month celebrations, students competed to name the two rooms. The “Crave Cave,” a sensory-inciting room, has rubber mats, a swing and toys, while the “Zen Zone” is low-lit with bubbles, bean bags, pillows, lava lamps and a sensory compression device — a human-sized canoe that hugs students, Lodato explained at a May 9 meeting of the district’s governing board.
The April event also debuted new bilingual augmentative communication boards. These sandwich-board signs include letters, sign language and visual symbols to support communication between students. They include symbols for “the most common things you might want to say on the playground,” Lodato said, like “Wanna play with me?” and “Your turn,” as well as pictures representing emotions, directions and verbs.
“Augmentative and alternative communication” refers to the ways an individual can communicate besides talking, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. These include gestures, writing, drawing, spelling words by pointing to letters and pointing to photos and written words, as well as higher-tech options like a computer or tablet to communicate with a speech-generating device, according to the association.
The school’s new augmentative communication boards, which will be placed in each classroom as well as common spaces like the playground, are just a small sample of the augmentative communication devices students can use at the school, according to Nelson.
Tablets at Emerson, which are in English and Spanish, are especially helpful for students who are nonspeaking, he said.
The school’s celebrations throughout Autism Awareness Month provided an opportunity for students in the school’s general education classrooms to learn about what it means to have autism, Lodato said. The school’s next steps, he said, are to teach all students how to better use the augmentative communication devices.
Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on Twitter at @maddieparrish61.
This article was originally published by a www.azcentral.com . Read the Original article here. .