What’s another 3.1 miles when you’ve just finished a marathon. Join Team JFK for our second year of participation in this great event. It starts and ends at Southborough’s Town Hall. Strollers, pets, and iPods welcome – a terrific family event with plenty of music and food at the finish.

Dear Michael and Julie:

Congratulations on John on receiving the Student of the Month award! He has worked hard over the past few months and really deserves this recognition.

The enclosed student write up has been posted on the Student of the Month board at school. Please feel free to stop by and look at the entire Student of the month write-ups. The award presentation will be taking place on Thursday, April 3rd at 2:10pm in the NECC library.
We look forward to seeing you!

Student write up:

John is an active 5-year-old boy who has been a student in the Intensive Instruction since March 2007. John is very engaging and very eager to please his teachers. John is great with his PECS. He requests a variety of different edibles and activities. John will make a sentence with PECS, request attention, and approximate the sentence and hand it to the teacher for all requests throughout the day.

John has recently been introduced to a vertical schedule at school. John picked his schedule up very quickly. He has done a great job and will independently manipulate his schedule.

John is a whiz at video modeling! He has learned to play with a lot of different toys. He can construct animals with K’nex, cars with bristle blocks, robots, and potato heads. He has done a great job learning new activities quickly and generalizing them across different teachers and enviroments. John has also learned a lot of imitation skills. He can imitate 2 and 3 step gross motor sequences and is beginning to work on 2 step object imitation. John has been able to demonstrate his excellent imitation skills when his friends come to visit during reverse integration.

The preschool is very proud of John and his accomplishments, and looks forward to even more progress in the future. Great job John!

The much anticipated Celtics drawing was held last night in front of a studio audience under the watchful eyes of accountants from our esteemed audit firm. The lucky winner? Danielle Ullrich! Her name was chosen randomly among all who have donated so far. Congratulations Danielle! Upon learning of her good fortune she exclaimed, “I never win anything!”, which may be true, but the real winner in all of this is John. To date Rob and I have raised an incredible $13,922.20 for NECC’s Annual Fund!

I believe that the most targetted and direct way to help a child with Autism is by providing the best learning environment possible, which is exactly what the Annual Fund is for. Yes, Autism research and awareness are important, but nothing will impact John’s immediate and long-term future more than pouring resources into what he needs the most to reach his fullest potential.

So, the next time you see John and he meets your eyes with a wave or a “bye, bye” please know that your donation has made this type of progress possible.

And, as Danielle and her husband Paul will attest after attending the Celts game this Friday, membership in the Marathon for John club has other rewards as well!

Last Wednesday night the team got together at NECC. Kristen Sidman, the school’s Director of Occupational Therapy and Adapted Physical Education, filled us in on the new pool. A few things I learned:

• Custom design. NECC’s pool, instead of sloping from the short sides, slopes from one long side to the other. Stairs make up one entire long side. This allows a greater area for use in class sessions.
• Maintenance. It’s incredibly expensive to maintain an indoor pool. Chemicals, heating, equipment. It adds up quickly to the tune of over $100,000 annually. Kristen described the dynamic nature of a pool in that chemicals and temperatures were continuously changing and the computer system keeps everything in balance.
• Safety. The school’s top priority. There are no diving platforms or extraneous equipment. The student/aide ratio in the pool is one-to-one. There is also a ratio of swimmers to life guards and anyone in the pool area is considered a potential swimmer.

It truly is a beautiful pool and, knowing how much John loves the water, a tremendous resource for the students at NECC.

For the remainder of the meeting our coaches Leon and Sally gave their perspective on running the Boston Marathon. Both have run it multiple times so they know the course well. It was great hearing about their experiences and how the race has changed over the years.

John’s Individualized Education Plan has a total of 35 objectives administered among several different programs covering communication, social, behavioral, and self-help skills. He’s been on a structured program like this since the age of 3, and his schooling is year round save for the 5 weeks of vacation (never more than a week at a time) he gets per year. Needless to say, Julie and I are amazed and proud of how hard he works. We look forward to each monthly meeting to learn of his progress.

For example, one of the objectives of his “Pointing” program is “Across 2 people and 2 setting, John will point to request out of reach desired items which are up to 6 feet away in 90% of opportunities as summarized across 2 weeks.” Well, this is one of the goals he has mastered, meaning that he’s met the goal for the year way ahead of time! Of course, given the workload I’ve just described theres still plenty of work to do, especially with vocal imitation, eye contact, and self-help skills. But we’re hoping that John will continue to Master each of the goals set for these programs, and it’s his hard work and the hard work and dedication of his teachers at school that will help make this happen.