Mesa children with autism now have a new opportunity to be immersed in language rich classrooms with typical learners at a new preschool campus at Power and McKellips roads in Mesa. Both sets of students are gaining critical language skills at an early age.
“It’s a very innovative preschool because roughly half the kids have autism and half are typically developing students,” said CEO Daniel Openden, of Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center.
Daniel said typically developing students can benefit as much as those with autism because at preschool age, language skills are considered paramount to future learning whether the student has autism, or not.
“If you think about autism as a social disorder, it doesn’t make sense to take kids with autism and put them only around other kids with autism,” he commented. “So, they are getting the advantage of interacting with and learning from their typically developing peers.”
He added, students with autism, some of whom are completely nonverbal, can gain the knowledge they need to begin speaking, and those without the disorder develop strong language skills at a critical age. All the classes are taught by teachers who specialize in autism education.
Daniel said the preschool, the fifth of nine planned SARRC campuses to be opened across the Valley eventually, is also focused on the bigger community since kids with autism and those without will be peers, classmates, teammates, and co-workers and employers in the future, for example.
He added that learning to interact with kids who have different skills at a young age is a benefit to the kids themselves, and the community at large.
To encourage people to enroll their preschoolers and overcome any skepticism, Daniel said SARRC also makes financial incentives and all-day care available for the parents of typically developing students to encourage them to enroll.
He said the student-teacher ratio at the SARRC Mesa preschool campus is in the range of one teacher to every three to four kids in the classroom, compared to one teacher for between seven and 10 students in a standard preschool setting.
“We will encounter some of that initial resistance until those parents of typically developing kids come toward the school and once they see it, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m putting my kid in here.” Between the price and the number of teachers in the classroom and the number of people that are trying to elicit language, it kind of sells itself once we can get them in the door to take a look at it,” Daniel added.
American timepiece manufacturer FTS USA partners with SARRC to hire and train teens and adults with autism and introduce them to the mainstream Arizona workforce at FTS’ Mesa manufacturing location.
“Crafting exceptional products and empowering the American workforce by nurturing skillful artisans, fostering valuable expertise, and cultivating versatile skill sets for a brighter industrial landscape in the United States of America,” FTS says on its website.
The Northeast Mesa SARRC preschool campus is part of a larger, strategic plan launched in 2019 to expand its services for students with autism across the Valley. The preschool is near Mesa Community College, Red Mountain Campus.
“SAARC’s vision is people with autism meaningfully integrated into inclusive communities,” Daniel said. “Within that, all of those pieces have meaning. We serve people across the lifespan. We want people, kids, teens, and adults with autism to be meaningfully integrated into their communities, whether in general education classrooms, going to summer camp, playing Little League, dance class, gymnastics or anything else.”
Daniel said SARRC hopes to partner and build community relationships with schools, businesses, city officials, and social service agencies close to the Northeast Mesa campus as it seeks to be more visible in the Valley and expand its reach.
For more information, call (602) 340-8717, or email sarrc@autismcenter.org