Table of Contents
24,000-square-foot Sarah Dooley Center for Autism at St. Joseph's Villa in northern Henrico.
The school building, which now has a sensory library, health suite and other specialized spaces, also will serve as a training facility to advance best practices in autism education, research and care.
“This is a historic day, a very historic day,” said Kathleen Burke Barrett, CEO of St. Joseph’s Villa, the nonprofit that runs SDCA.
Often at these nonresidential programs, commonly known as private day schools, children will transfer out of the public school system and stay at the private day until they matriculate out of the school system. In Virginia, neither school divisions nor private day schools have a financial incentive to move students back into public schools.
But at SDCA, staff are trained to teach students the skills to be successful in less restrictive environments, and successfully return to the public school system.
“We're not your first choice, when you have a baby, where you want your kids to end up,” said Adam Dreyfus, senior director of SDCA. “Parents come to us at the end of their ropes.”
The mechanisms that keep students in private day centers are usually the unwillingness of both the parents and the school divisions. On one hand, public schools often lack the expertise and resources to handle the children’s behavior, and on the other hand, parents are unhappy that their children aren’t receiving a quality education.
Porter Scoglio, 15, transferred out of Henrico County Public Schools and into SDCA three years ago.
“We came here and it was life changing,” said Porter’s mother, Megan Scoglio. “The difference in her before and after was night and day.”
Although the family loved HCPS, the school was unable to meet Porter’s needs, and behavioral issues were getting in the way of education.
“Once she was able to be an active participating student in the classroom, she's been able to make academic achievements,” Scoglio said. “She's reading now, she knows about 100 sight words, she's excited to come to school every day.”
Although Porter is not on the autism spectrum, she has a sensory processing disorder, which mimics many behaviors of children with autism. At SDCA, she’s able to benefit from the therapies and strategies that have been established over time for children with autism.
“Every day, hour to hour, it's wonderful especially because it's always changing,” Scoglio said. “She's got loads of energy and they really know how to balance that with getting work done, and learning, and being a good citizen, and being a good student.”
The SDCA looks and feels like a typical school, but also includes specialized spaces that cater to students’ sensory needs. It’s also run like a public school with the same tempo, schedule and patterns.
“That's one of the strongest things that this school does, is it will permit me to accelerate how quickly I send kids back,” Dreyfus said. “When the kids go back (to public school), there's not this big jump from this really weird clinical setting that feels like a hospital, to a public school, which is noisy, fast and messy.”
When the SDCA first sent a student back to HCPS in 2014, there was no mechanism for how that would work, because it had rarely happened before, according to Dreyfus.
“We’re easily the school division’s top choice because they know we’re not just sending this kid here for the next 15 years, then we never see them again,” Dreyfus said. “They know that I wake up thinking, ‘how can we get that kid back to [HCPS]?”
The Villa’s five-year fundraising campaign raised a total of $30.6 million which funded the new center. In those five years, the number of children identified with autism spectrum disorder increased from 1 in 68 to 1 in 54, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We are here, not because if you build it, they will come,” Drefus said. “They are already here.”
* * *
Anna Bryson is the Henrico Citizen's education reporter and a Report for America corps member. Make a tax-deductible donation to support her work, and RFA will match it dollar for dollar.
