Helping break down the walls of autism

By karl vilacoba
Staff Writer

PHOTOS BY KARL VILACOBA Special education teacher Allie McVeigh confers with Congressman Chris Smith at the Brick Community Primary Learning Center. Smith toured Brick classrooms last week to observe educational approaches for children with autism spectrum disorders.

BRICK — Christmas promises to be different in the Lanzieri home this year.

In the past, Bob Lanzieri’s autistic son T.J., 9, could not differentiate the holiday from any other day of the week. He woke up and headed straight for his VCR, ignoring the tree and the presents beneath it.

"Now, we’ll walk up to a big display somewhere, and I’ll say, ‘What’s that?’ And T.J. will say, ‘Christmas,’ " Lanzieri said.

Lanzieri, of Brick, credits much of his son’s significant progress to a new approach to educating children with autism spectrum disorders now being practiced in the Brick Township school district. It is an approach that some believe could shatter the conventional wisdom that the key to teaching autistic students is the costly practice pairing them one-on-one with a special education assistant for the whole day.

Students at Midstreams Elementary School, Midstreams Road, make holiday wreaths as part of an educational exercise last week.

The new method is based on a model studied by Florida-based educational consultant Dr. Vincent Carbone, who has been working with local parents and teachers in workshop sessions. The programming is being provided in cooperation with the Parents of Autistic Children (POAC), a small Brick-based grassroots group of which Lanzieri serves as president.

According to Lanzieri, a key to the educational approach has been substituting functional models for labels in teaching. For instance, instead of pointing at your foot and saying, "This is a shoe," teachers would now approach the topic by asking, "What do you wear on your feet?" The difference is that the students are learning the words’ meanings in a practical context, rather than simply repeating a word without fully understanding its concept.

"This method is just a few years old, but it really appears to accelerate a child’s learning," said U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-4), co-founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Autism Caucus. "We really need to get this message out, not just in Monmouth and Ocean counties, but through all of New Jersey and the rest of the country."

Autism spectrum disorder is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life, according to the Autism Society of America’s Web site. The symptoms and characteristics can present themselves in a wide variety of combinations and severity, but typically affect the way people process and respond to information. It is estimated that autism affects two to six people per 1,000, or up to 1.5 million Americans.

Smith, whom POAC and the educational community at large acknowledge as a champion of autism research, was in Brick Dec. 4 to observe these approaches up close and speak with its practitioners. Smith is now pushing for the Teacher Education for Autistic Children Act of 2002 (TEACH), a bill that would allot $20 million in federal funds toward training teachers to deal with autism spectrum disorders by offering incentives like grants, scholarships and tax credits. He said he is "very confident" that he will find the support to pass it when Congress reconvenes next year.

Smith was recently named POAC’s person of the year, an honor he shared with Brick Mayor Joseph Scarpelli. The congressman spearheaded a past study on autism’s causes and a possible cluster in the Brick area at a time when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) placed a low priority on such research, Lanzieri said.

"I was appalled at the CDC’s lack of understanding of this issue," Smith said. "If you don’t know how much of a problem you have, you can’t address the issue."

Although the origins of autism spectrum disorders are still something of a mystery, the study did conclude that their frequency has increased dramatically across the nation.

"If there’s a trigger out there, we’ve got to have a Manhattan Project mentality to find it," Smith said.

Brick currently has five classrooms in the district that serve autistic children. The district is now exploring the ability to return students being taught in out-of-district locations to Brick schools to provide autistic programming. Administrators hope the move will help students to better function in their local community and be exposed to their neighborhood peers.

Smith’s visits to district classrooms included the Brick Community Primary Learning Center, Route 70, and Midstreams Elementary School, Midstreams Road.

A common feature of the classroom walls in both schools was a series of cards that explain the seven different levels of communication to be taught. They ranged from the most basic principle of "mand," or asking for something, to the final level of intraverbal communication, which entails answering questions in a conversational manner.

Each level has its own set of antecedents, learner behaviors and behavior reinforcers. The ultimate goal is to nurture the students’ communication skills to the point where they can function independently in society.

At Midstreams Elementary School, Dana Havens’ class learned some of these communication skills through making Christmas wreaths.

"The objective here is to ask — to ask for the glue, for the paper and then we immediately reinforce their behavior," Havens said. "Reinforcement is key. They get reinforced for talking, so they can learn to go to a McDonald’s and order, so they can go and ask for a video at the store."