Celebrating Autism Awareness Month

April is National Autism Awareness & Acceptance Month!  During this month, CSESA will be releasing and sharing a newly created resource each week.

Week of April 4th:   Spring eNews Edition

Week of April 11th: Internet Safety Autism-at-a-Glance (You get a sneak peek below!!)

Week of April 18th: Healthy Eating Autism-at-a-Glance

Week of April 25th: Research Snapshot: Focus Groups

Recent Conferences and Events

Gatlinburg Conference

March 2016

Some of the CSESA team attended the Gatlinburg Conference in March and gave two poster presentations related to the work that CSESA is doing.

See the poster presentation Quality of High School Programs for Students with ASD in the United States, which reported the results from the Autism Program Evaluation Rating Scale (APERS) during Year 1 of our study HERE.

See the poster presentation Transition Planning for High School Students with ASD: Measuring Student, Parent, and Teacher Perspectives, which reported results from the Secondary School Success Checklist (SSSC) during Year 1 of our study HERE.

New CSESA Resources

Check out this Autism at-a-Glance resource on Puberty. Link to this resource HERE. This Autism at-a-Glance was designed to support high school staff and family members in supporting adolescents on the autism spectrum during the changes associated with puberty.

Please feel free to download it and share it with teachers, families, or community members that you know who might be interested in the resource.

Our newest Autism at-a-Glance on Internet Safety is HERE. This Autism at-a-Glance was designed to support high school staff and family members in supporting adolescents on the autism spectrum as they begin to explore the internet.

Please feel free to download it and share it with teachers or families that you know who might be interested in it.

Autism at-a-Glance is a series of practitioner and family-friendly documents created by the Center on Secondary Education for Students with ASD (CSESA) designed for high school staff members supporting students on the autism spectrum, as well as family members of adolescents with ASD. The purpose of the Autism at-a-Glance series is to provide a current summary of topics relevant to high school students with ASD as well as practical tips and resources for school and community personnel and family members. The complete Autism at-a-Glance series can be found here.

On The Horizon

Look for us at the 2016 Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) convention in St. Louis, Missouri, April 13-16, 2016.

Several current and former CSESA team members will be presenting on a variety of topics including monitoring implementation, technology, and peer networks.

Research Highlights

We are over half way through the large CSESA study, and we have been busy working on assessments, training and coaching, and implementation across the schools in the project. Based on our fall and winter recruitment, we are excited to share our latest numbers.

3 states,

   60 schools

      544 students

          544 families AND

over 500 school staff!

CSESA Spotlight

As we move towards the end of the CSESA study, we are being mindful of focusing on the sustainability of CSESA in the school districts with whom we are working. One way that we are focusing on sustainability is by establishing partnerships between schools and other local community partners. In North Carolina, we have partnered with the Autism Society of North Carolina (ASNC) in several different counties to support Transitioning Together, a program for parents and teens of individuals on the autism spectrum. Two of the ASNC groups wrote grants and received funding to support their partnership with CSESA and the school districts. Congratulations to the ASNC Chapters on this news!

We are excited to see the different ways in which the many partnerships fostered as part of the CSESA project will continue to grow.