Monday, the White House, Niagara Falls and the Empire State Building were bathed in blue light to honor World Autism Awareness Day.

The one-day worldwide event served as the kickoff for National Autism Awareness Month throughout the United States. 

According to the Autism Society, autism now impacts one of every 68 children in America. In the Vicksburg Warren School District there are 63 students who have been diagnosed with autism with at least one at each of the district’s 16 schools including the Academy of Innovation and River City Early College.

The district has measures in place to assist students no matter where they fall on the autism spectrum and works to support them regardless of which school they attend.

“I take pride as the director in the fact that we don’t limit students to Beechwood,” VWSD special education director Amy Deason said. “We don’t limit kids to one location. One big thing in Vicksburg is that they like to have their kids in their own community schools. We make sure we have the support available to students where they are in the district.”

Beechwood Elementary has the highest concentration of autistic students with 14, and Missy Broome who teaches a self-contained autism class at the school, said that is because Beechwood has the district’s only early-education program for special needs students 3-5 year olds.

To assist the 63 students with autism throughout the district and the total of 1,000 students with disabilities, the district employs four behavior specialists and nine speech and language pathologists.

“We have behavior therapists in the district,” Deason said. “They will do a function behavior assessment. If there is a lot of anxiety, then we target that specific anxiety and how to help them adapt.

“Our students with autism, some of them have higher functioning language skills and some don’t speak. They are non-verbal. They have communication devices and we have a couple of our speech and language pathologists who work with those kids on devices and learn how to express themselves.”

It was with one of the non-verbal students where Deason said they saw some of the most success. The student, who was 10 or 11 at the time, she said, would become aggressive and start pinching or biting because he couldn’t communicate. By working with a speech pathologist and teaching the student to use a communication device, they were able to open a whole new world to him.

“We felt it was because he couldn’t express what he needed. Once he started using a communication device, his dad was so excited because he could then say ‘I want a pop-tart’ or ‘I am hungry,’” Deason said.

Broome’s self-contained course at Beechwood includes five of the 14 students at the school who are on the spectrum, with the others being mainstreamed into typical classes. There, she works with them using a therapy known as Applied Behavior Analysis or ABA, which works with children to teach them new behaviors and skills.

“For any child with a difficulty, even ADA or another disability, ABA breaks things down, which makes learning easier,” Broome said. “We assume that everybody can get dressed in the morning, but a child with autism, they cannot put those steps together in a sequential order. ABA can help break things down to help them learn what is next.”

Many of the students Broome has worked with in the self-contained course have advanced to the point where in later grades they can be mainstreamed and succeed.

“It is the biggest reward you could ever imagine,” Broome said. “Especially with a kid who started at 3 and didn’t speak much and now he is competing at the high school in a sport. He still has his trouble and difficulty, but he has come a long way and that is the most rewarding thing.”