Pursuing Virtue with Autism

April is recognized as Autism Awareness and Acceptance Month. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex, lifelong developmental condition that typically appears during early childhood and can impact a person’s social skills, communication, relationships, and self-regulation. The Autism experience is different for everyone. It is defined by a certain set of behaviors that affects people differently and to varying degrees. While there is currently no known single cause of Autism, early diagnosis helps a person receive resources that can support the choices and opportunities needed to live fully.

Providing access to a classical education to students with developmental disabilities is central to Great Hearts’ philosophy of education, which seeks to enrich the lives of all of our children. Tom Doebler, Senior National Director of Exceptional Student Services, credits our partnership with Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center (SARRC) as an important fixture of our academies to provide access to our classical, liberal arts offering.

“SARRC has been there for us in many ways; their social challenges screening program has helped raise awareness about Autism as a spectrum disorder that impacts kids in different ways and at different times in their lives and development, and it has also helped us identify students who could use more of our support with their social development. Once those students were identified, SARRC was right there to provide training and guidance to our staff so that we could support these students in our schools,” said Doebler.

Doebler says their clinical teams have helped our academies in numerous ways. Sometimes by providing training to entire faculties, sometimes by helping our teaching teams learn how to better support and teach a particular student, and sometimes by training a particular staff member to implement a therapeutic behavioral approach in the classroom setting.

“Throughout, SARRC has always been interested in who WE are as an organization – the ideals we are passionate about, and our vision of human flourishing. Their team has always been interested in learning how to change their language and approach to show the alignment between their methods and our vision of habit formation and the pursuit of virtue.”

“For our part, Great Hearts has been keen to help SARRC in their mission to improve the lives of people with Autism everywhere, but especially in Arizona. Generally, we do this by supporting their research in ways big and small. We partnered with them on the project for screening students for social challenges by helping to build a screening system that is relatively low-lift for any public school to adopt, and we have been operating that screening system in many of our schools for over 5 years now,” said Deobler. “We have also been a vehicle of awareness for other projects they are working on, the latest one being a project to ‘normalize’ data on social, communication, and functional skills so that they can help parents obtain more support services for their children through their family’s insurance.”

“Autism Acceptance Month is a great reminder that we can and should see the individual, not a diagnosis, and work together to advocate for the unique services and supports that help each person live fully,” said Christopher Banks, President and CEO of the Autism Society of America, in a recent press release.

Do you have a story or know of a story that you would like to see featured at Great Hearts?  Please contact jmoore@greatheartsamerica.org.