School Spotlight- Brookville Center for Children’s Services Inc., Barbara C. Wilson Site.
The children at the Brookville Center for Children’s Services Inc., Barbara C. Wilson Site play and learn with purpose. Walk into one of their self-contained classrooms and you’ll find students deeply engaged in structured and diverse activities that cement their academic, developmental, and social skills. The Woodbury, New York school—part of the Brookville Center for Children’s Services — serves over 130 students with a wide range of developmental needs, including children with autism spectrum disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, and speech and language disorder.
In 2010, STAR Autism Support began a long-term collaboration with the Barbara C. Wilson Preschool to support students in ten classrooms. Consultants provide in-class support and yearly workshops to increase fidelity of those currently using the STAR Program, as well as train new staff and teachers at this dynamic school. What’s more, many of the administrators and instructors have completed the STAR certification process and are now certified STAR coaches supporting teachers and staff with mini-trainings, classroom support, and mentoring.
The STAR-supported classrooms at the Barbara C. Wilson Preschool utilize evidence-based instructional practices that reach all learners: individual visual schedules, teaching rotations with discrete trial and pivotal response training, small group generalization activities, and positive behavior supports throughout the day. This is paired with the school’s use of a multidisciplinary team approach to support individual student needs — combining forces of teachers, assistants, speech/language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, psychologists, social workers, and Board-Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs). These teams conduct weekly meetings to strengthen student success, ensuring that classrooms are implementing strategies with fidelity, practicing consistent data collection, and documenting individual student progress.
This spirit of collaboration is also present in the school’s encouragement of parental involvement, providing workshops, support groups, and one-on-one coaching lessons to parents, embracing methods and instructional practices from Teaching Social Communication to Children with Autism (Ingersoll and Dvortcsak, 2010).
STAR Autism Support would like to thank the administrators, instructors, and staff members at Brookville Center’s Barbara C. Wilson Preschool for their commitment and dedication to students with special needs.
We are honored to part of your team!
Since the inception of the company, STAR Autism Support has been a leader in autism teaching strategies, in particular in building capacity for districts, regional programs and states of all sizes to effectively serve students with autism spectrum disorders and other developmental disabilities. STAR Autism Support has worked with over 2,500 school districts and over 25,000 educators across the United States and throughout the world.
If you have a school you would like to see highlighted in a future newsletter please email Anna Clarke at anna.clarke@starautismsupport.com.