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Columns::November 11, 2002
Women’s Studies Program celebrates 25 years on campus
Wrigley is named senior vice president for external affairs
UGA Press announces winners of annual Flannery O’Connor Awards
Speaking off the cuff
Pay dirt
On guard
Kudos
Retirees
Independent streak
Brick by brick
Campus News
University receives $894,000 grant for new autism program
By Michael Childs
mchilds@coe.uga.edu
David L. Gast, professor of special education, has been awarded an $894,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to
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David Gast
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begin a three-year collaboration with the Gwinnett County Public Schools in what will be Georgia’s first specific graduate level teacher-preparation program in the area of autism.
Gast will be director of the new project aimed at preparing more Georgia educators to teach children with autism-spectrum disorders. Deanna Luscre, who coordinates the autism-spectrum disorders program for Gwinnett Schools, is co-director of the project.
Teaching social skills may not have been the responsibility of traditional public education, but that is changing quickly. Educators say more and more children are turning up in public schools diagnosed with a mild form of autism called Asperger syndrome. Children with Asperger’s usually have serious problems with non-verbal social cues, such as reading someone’s facial expressions. They may have difficulty initiating or maintaining a conversation.
“These kids are really quite high in functioning--gifted, creative in many ways,” says Gast. “These are the kids for whom I think we have the greatest challenge [in teaching].” Communication by children with Asperger’s is often described as talking at others (for example, delivering a monologue on a favorite subject that continues despite attempts by others to interject comments). Such children also lag in simple motor skills, such as running. And most develop an obsessive focus on a narrow interest.
While children without the disorder may exhibit some of these behaviors, experts say those with Asperger’s have constant problems because they misunderstand social cues and often overreact, throwing tantrums and sometimes even striking out at others. Their frustration often arises from an inability to think abstractly and a tendency to misunderstand common figures of speech.
“These kids are very bright--they can be social, but they want others to live in their world and they want to control that world,” Gast says, “so they can be pretty manipulative and that creates a lot of social problems for them.”
Research has shown that these children usually require formal instruction to learn how to express their feelings, how to give and accept praise, how to apologize and even how to take turns in a conversation.
The nation saw a 556 percent increase in the number of children with ASD being served in special education from 1991 to 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are an estimated 150,000 U.S. children under the age of 18 identified with ASD.
“In Georgia, the number of children with autism disorder (between the ages of 6 and 21) grew from 266 to 1,916 from 1993 to 2000,” says Gast. “That’s really what we were responding to when we developed this project. In Gwinnett County, they experienced an 800 percent increase between 1996 and 2000. They went from the identification of 33 children with autism-spectrum disorders to 328. Right now, they have 84 classrooms for children with autism disorder. That’s huge. That means they need a minimum of 84 teachers, not to mention a number of trained paraprofessionals.”
Those soaring numbers led to discussions with Gwinnett school administrators on how UGA could help and, after a year of planning, the Collaborative Personnel Preparation in Autism project (COPPA) was developed. While most Gwinnett special education teachers are prepared in some area of special education, it is rarely specific to autism. As a result, Gwinnett schools have been spending time and money on in-service training year after year.
“Our hope, through this grant, is that those teachers who are interested in this population will enter our program and get that graduate training, thus relieving the school system of much of what they have to do on site,” says Gast.
The program will begin with a first cohort of 15 students, mostly from Gwinnett schools, in January 2003 and add another 15 students in the summer or fall of 2003.
“We’re committed to 15 students per year. We have funding that will support these students in the form of fellowships, graduate assistantships and tuition stipends,” says Gast. “We’ve had interest shown from teachers throughout northeast Georgia, so we hope we’ll be getting students from other counties as well.” |
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