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Enrollment at the Sussex Consortium is rising, and about 80 percent of consortium students have autism. Principal Elizabeth Joynes expects her enrollment to continue to climb.
The specialized school serves students with autism and other disabilities from across the county. Its specialized staff instructs students at the Dupont Avenue location in Lewes and supports students who attend classes at all Cape Henlopen School District buildings as mainstreamed pupils.
This year, the program serves nearly 160 autistic students, ages 2 to 21, and close to 40 more with other disabilities, said Joynes..
Students in the consortium have a variety of learning disabilities outside autism as well as emotional problems. The non-autistic students are often Cape students who do not perform well behaviorally at their home schools, said Joynes. She said small classes and more individualized attention help consortium students succeed.
This year, Joynes said, the consortium expanded its presence to Beacon Middle School. She said the school expands slowly to make sure its students have the support they need. Autistic students from the Sussex Consortium attend every school in the district besides H.O. Brittingham Elementary School in Milton. That support comes in the form of small class sizes and additional staff. Cape Superintendent George Stone said other districts whose students attend the consortium, run by Cape, pay the local portion of staff salaries from their tuition taxes, as does Cape. Teachers and staff are paid by the state and by the district. Stone said the cost of running the school, paying staff, transporting students and purchasing supplies is divided out to a per-pupil cost and that is shared by all schools that send students to the program. Cape uses no local funds to pay for consortium programs other than its share from tuition taxes, Stone said.
Supporting students
Consortium students have a great range of functional levels. Joynes said her staff has students who are completely nonverbal and ones with considerable behavioral problems. The school also has students who attend regular classes and make top scores on standardized tests.
Many mainstreamed students are academic but still need help with everyday skills. Still, all students receive support from trained staff that knows the characteristics of autism.
Staff and students do behavioral and communicative work all day, every day, said Joynes.
Students who are unable to communicate verbally do so with a picture exchange system. The technique for helping autistic students communicate was developed in Delaware, by Andrew Bondy, former head of the Delaware Autistic Program, said Joynes. Each student keeps a set of pictures handy. “With the pictures, they can tell us exactly what they want,” Joynes said.
Teachers also model behavior for students – walking through the consortium hallways, a teacher holds up her hand slowly, deliberately, and says, “Hello;” the student follows her actions.
“We have 160 autistic students, so we have 160 different programs,” Joynes said. That’s because the characteristics of the condition are varied and can cause fluctuations in students’ moods and interests. “One day, they love something and the next day they hate it,” said Joynes. Those quick changes require teachers to actively journal their students’ days and activities.
The students carry around a book of pictures and symbols to help them communicate through the day. Consortium staff uses a system of rewards to keep students motivated. Sometimes, that means offering a reward every minute to keep students on task, said Joynes.
Learning everyday skills
Consortium students need help with everyday tasks, said Joynes. “We can teach them everything they need to be self-sufficient adults, if they are capable of that,” she said. Students learn in a life-skills center that recreates home conditions – including a bedroom, washer and dryer, kitchen and full bathroom – where students learn hygiene, cooking and cleaning. Picture diagrams explaining step-by-step how to complete life skills help the students. The consortium provides the same diagrams to parents for students to use at home and offers parent training and parent-support groups. Joynes said parenthood can be difficult for everyone and more so for parents of autistic students. Still, the difficulties of parenting and teaching children with disabilities at the same time create some of the greatest rewards. Joynes said there is nothing like the feeling of pride in seeing a child who has struggled to do something catch on and succeed. “It is so special,” she said.
Consortium basics
The Sussex Consortium opened in the 1970s as an intensive learning center for students with different types of disabilities who were not successful in the district’s traditional programs.
Joynes said it slowly became that many of the disabilities were related to autism. As there were children with autism in other districts, the Sussex Consortium began to serve their needs as well.
Joynes said the consortium’s biggest hurdle is space.
New consortium classrooms were added onto Mariner Middle School in Milton. A planned addition to Beacon Middle School in Lewes ran into its own roadblock when the state declined to give the district’s funding request top priority.
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