Saturday, November 9, 2024

This nonprofit helps kids and adults with autism learn life skills. Here’s how

The Peninsula School at the Faison Center off Nettles Drive in Newport News (WYDaily/ Julia Marsigliano)
The Peninsula School at the Faison Center off Nettles Drive in Newport News. (WYDaily/ Julia Marsigliano)

NEWPORT NEWS — The Peninsula School at the Faison Center is an individualized program for children and adults with autism.

The goal is to foster independence.

“It’s very individualized,” said Adam Warman, vice president of program development for the Faison Center. “We take all of our cures from the learners”

History

Prior to joining with the Richmond-based nonprofit, the Peninsula School helped students for eight years and shared a space with the Boys & Girls Club, Nettles Drive. The nonprofit used the Faison Center as a consultant and in May 2018, the center took over the Peninsula School.

The nonprofit is funded primarily through tuition, donations, grants and donors, Warman said.

The educational center at the Peninsula School provides a variety of life skills to the students from getting dressed and expressing emotions to cooking classes and kitchen safety. These lessons along with communication, listening and behavioral skills training, are incorporated into the learning curriculum for the students, who are still expected to learn the state’s standards of learning topics such as math, reading and science.

“We work on those things adapted to their level,” Warman said. “We meet them where they are.”

Warman said the center’s individualized approach approach is used to measure the quality of instruction instead of just the quantity. One example is teaching a student 1,000 things and taking that number and as well as the amount of times the student mastered those things.

Warman said he feels it’s important to measure both quality and quantity when it comes to learning, adding the teachers have a flexible curriculum going at the pace of each particular student.

“It’s a bit of a moving target for good reasons — kids need support and as they improve we can fade out a little bit,” he said.

The center currently has 16 students enrolled with ages ranging from 7 to 22. The students are split into groups of eight for instruction but can be further divided into smaller groups or one-on-one sessions. Each classroom has a certified special education teacher and a behavioral analyst in addition to multiple teaching assistants.

Warman said the facility also has a certified speech therapist on staff.

The teaching assistants require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree or a high school diploma and two years of experience working with special education children before undergoing two to three weeks of training, Warman said.

So how can students enroll in the program?

Students from ages 2 to 22 can enroll in the program in one of two ways, either through the Newport News Public Schools, who contract services with the Faison Center, or by paying tuition, which costs about $55,000 per year before tuition assistance.

Warman said the highest number of students come from the city’s public schools who fund the program through a combination of state and local funds.

Future plans

The Peninsula School is in the process of moving to a different location in City Center for more space. The new building is expected to open in November or by the end of the year.

“This space is specifically designed and laid out for this and the type of teaching we do,” Warman said.

Some upgrades to the new renovated building will include a larger multipurpose room, five classrooms designed for eight children each and more office space for teachers. It will have the capacity to enroll up to 40 students as opposed to just 16.

The current facility only has three classrooms for multiple students, five individual stations, a multipurpose room, kitchenette and some staff offices.

The old building, 12749 Nettles Drive, which the nonprofit rents from the Boys & Girls Club, will be used for an early education center for children up to age 5, Warman said.

“Our goal is to work ourselves out of job –– to have them not be as dependent on us,” Warman said. “This science that we use is capable of changing lives in a way that nothing else is. It’s a blessing to be able to do it.”

“It just works,” he added.

Julia Marsigliano
Julia Marsiglianohttp://wydaily.com
Julia Marsigliano is a multimedia reporter for WYDaily. She covers everything on the Peninsula from local government and law enforcement agencies to family-run businesses and weather updates. Before WYDaily, she covered Hampton and Newport News for WYDaily’s sister publication, HNNDaily before both publications merged in December 2018. Julia was born in Tokyo, Japan and moved to Long Island, New York in 2001. A true New Yorker, she loves pizza, bagels and good Chinese food. Send comments, tips and other tidbits to julia@localvoicemedia.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmarsigliano

Related Articles

MORE FROM AUTHOR