Autism program developed by local teacher

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For many students, high school can be a social awkward time — especially students identified as “high functioning autistic” or those who generally have a higher intelligence level but lack social skills.

Beavercreek High School teacher Jennifer Schmidt has developed a class to address the special needs of these students.

“I’ve been teaching for 18 years and learned a lot about working with kids with autism while teaching in North Carolina,” Schmidt said. “When I moved back to Ohio, I taught special education and did some tutoring and ended up working with Cindy Brinson, our speech pathologist at Beavercreek.”

Brinson, who has since retired, and Schmidt started noticing that what they did wasn’t working with their students, so they began sitting together at lunch and brainstorming on an entirely different model using student peers in the classroom.

“These kids are very bright,” Schmidt said. “But they miss sarcasm and figurative language. They don’t know how to make a friend. They are brilliant minds, but they lack social skills. I didn’t want those minds to be wasted.”

Schmidt and Brinson wrote a proposal and presented it to Beavercreek administrators for a new communications class designed especially for high functioning autism students and their peers, and it was accepted as a pilot in the 2007-08 school year.

“We had around eight students in the first class,” Schmidt said. “They were all Cindy’s speech therapy students we thought would be great candidates for the class.”

And because the students are all quite bright, the duo wrote the curriculum around a college level human relations course.

The pilot program was fully embraced by Beavercreek City Schools, and the Schmidt and Brinson’s communication class has become a regular offering at the high school level, offered to juniors and seniors and, with some exceptions, sophomores. Autistic students are referred to the program, and student peers may apply.

“We teach students how to start conversations and how to use eye contact, appropriate voice and how to ensure expression matches what they are saying,” Schmidt said. “We go to lunch and on a field trip and an outing each quarter and make sure these are authentic high school settings.”

The students are encouraged to push themselves outside their comfort zones since many, like one of Schmidt’s first year communications class students, Joseph Hedgcorth, suffer from social anxiety. Hedgcorth, Schmidt said, really came out of his “shell” during this class and told her he “feels less like a turtle,” the result of the class.

“And this is what we want students to do,” Schmidt said. “To poke their heads out and try new things, little by little.”

Other students, like Ariel Kramer, said the class helped her make many new friends. “It felt like a family because we could talk about anything in the class,” she said.

With two classes of eight students and eight coaches, they are learning from each other as the year progresses. Peer coaches come in for a one day training prior to the school year and many say they want to move on after graduation to related careers.

“I think it’s amazing how much of a positive impact coaches can have on the students in the program,” said graduating senior Brian Davidson, a coach in the communications class this past year. “It was cool to see them up to their full potential by the end of the year.” Davidson is attending the University of Dayton in the fall and majoring in pre-med with a minor in psychology.

Parents of students have also offered rave reviews of the program. Leanna Perez-Green’s son Levi, who also recently graduated from Beavercreek high school, said the class changed her son’s life completely. “This class teaches skills. They also put those skills to use in the community, and Levi responded really well to that,” Perez-Green said. “I think he got to know and trust the peers and that made all the difference. I have friends from other places in the country who have kids on the spectrum and say they wish they had a program like this.”

Schmidt has written a book about her class and is in the process of having it published. “You can purchase the book and learn how to start a communications class or do a lesson or two,” Schmidt said. “We developed this because we saw a need, and I’m thankful to Beavercreek City Schools because they were able to think outside the box. This is all for the kids.”