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2009: Special Needs Citation

Part of the Class
Novel program brings autistic and general ed kids together

An autistic child in today’s public school system is no longer automatically separated from his non-autistic peers when it comes to classroom instruction. That’s thanks in large part to a group of concerned educators led by three farsighted women. 

In 2001, New York University education specialist Dorothy Siegel teamed up with former District 15 School Superintendent Carmen Farina and Hunter College professor Shirley Cohen to create the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Nest Program, devoted to assimilating students with high-functioning autism in grades K to 8 into the mainstream school system. Autistic children also attend social development intervention classes for individualized help. The program prepares them for real-life situations beyond the classroom.  

“Kids have a much better chance of leading more productive lives later on than if they were segregated as special needs kids,” Farina said.

A key feature of the program is collaborative team teaching, in which two instructors—one certified in general education and the other in special education—teach a class of 12 to 25 children, only four or five of whom are autistic. That’s a drastic change from how education used to be approached. Before a 1975 federal law granted special needs children the right to a mainstream public education, children with learning disorders were often taught apart from others.  

“Kids with special needs were not integrated,” Siegel said. “They were sent down to the basement. It’s like they had cooties or something.” 

The inclusion movement took off in the 1990s, when parents and educators began to feel that special needs children were being discriminated against. Motivated by Temple Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures, the ASD Nest program, funded by the city, was piloted in P.S. 32 in Brooklyn in 2003. Currently in its sixth year, the program has already been adopted by 18 public schools in all five boroughs, including P.S. 178 in Washington Heights and P.S. 112 on East 119th Street.

Autistic children typically rely on teachers’ visual cues, such as signs and gestures, when they don’t understand oral instructions. In one exercise, a teacher asks the child to follow his or her eyes to find the “prize,” typically a toy.  

“We’ve learned that we have to be very careful about how much we talk to them at once,” said Erica Steinberg, assistant principal of P.S. 32 and a former Nest teacher.

Caroline Schrank is mother of a 1st grader with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, who attends P.S. 178.

“The program has changed our lives immensely,” she said. “He was sort of in the dark before,” she said of her son. “When he leaves school now, he waves goodbye to people. He comes home happy and talks about his day. He is just more aware of how life works.”  

The day that her son, petrified, first ate in the school cafeteria, a monitor noticed his fear and helped calm him down.

“The staff knows how to catch them before the thing becomes a problem so the kids can really feel safe,” Schrank said.  

Steinberg’s ASD kindergarteners from 2004 will be graduating from elementary school this year. Though seeing them off saddens her, she is overjoyed when they greet her in the hallways and interact with their peers in the cafeteria.  

“A lot of them came in with absolutely no social skills,” she said. “Now, a kid who didn’t even look at me before says hello and goodbye to me every day. It feels like I’ve made a difference there.”

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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Nest Program
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— Aline Reynolds