Autistic students granted a place apart.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 10/9/2004): Lane School, an educational program run by the Lane Education Service District, serves elementary and middle-school-aged children with intensive behavior support needs. A story on Page A1 on Friday mischaracterized its clientele.

While much attention this fall was fixed on the Eugene School District's two impressive new elementary schools, another new school quietly opened its doors.

Sandwiched between Kennedy Middle School and Churchill High School on Bailey Hill Road, Path Finder is technically a program, not a school, officials say. But it has its own building, its own staff and its own, decidedly unordinary, student body.

The 12 students, all ages 11 to 20, were hand-picked for Path Finder, which will serve a maximum of 15 in its first year. All of them qualify for special education services, and most have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome or other forms of high-functioning autism - a brain-based developmental disability that, for many children, renders the social and sensory pressures of middle and high school almost unbearable.

They include 14-year-old Tyler Hubble, a blond, pixieish boy who bounced among four different schools during his middle school years in search of a tolerable fit. He spent part of last year at Jefferson Middle School.

"I did pretty good there until some of the kids in the school started threatening me because they started thinking I was annoying," said Tyler, who has a tendency to interrupt and blurt out off-the-wall remarks.

David Walters, an introverted, gangly 15-year-old, was shuttled among even more schools before enrolling at Path Finder this fall.

"I can't handle big classrooms, over 15 kids," said Walters, who does not have an official diagnosis of autism but displays many of the hallmark characteristics. "I didn't work that well with those kids."

Meeting growing demand

Located in a modular building that once housed the Lane School for juvenile delinquents, Path Finder is the flagship item on the district's expanding menu of services for autistic children. The incidence of autism has exploded across the nation in the past decade, a puzzling phenomenon only partly explained by better diagnosis. Oregon has the highest rate in the country, according to federal statistics, and Eugene in turn has a still higher rate.

In the 2003-04 school year, 7.9 percent of Eugene's special education students had autism as their primary diagnosis, compared with a state average of 5.6 percent, according to the state Department of Education.

Eugene's numbers have ballooned in the past six years, growing from 93 in 1998-99 to approximately 234 in 2003-04, special education administrator K.C. Clark said. Among those 234 is a remarkable range of abilities, she said, from those with no communication ability and severe cognitive delays to those who can talk your ear off and ace the SAT.

In that same time span, the district - with prodding from well-organized parent advocates - recognized that it wasn't doing enough, especially for high-functioning autistic students at the middle and high school level.

Such students are usually very bright but profoundly deficient in social skills - a trait that becomes glaringly obvious in middle school. Many are easily agitated and prone to meltdowns, sometimes from unusual sensory responses to things as seemingly innocuous as the odor of fried food, the sound of a toilet flushing or the bump of a shoulder in a crowded classroom.

Often, their peers exclude them at best and torment them at worst.

This school year, the district earmarked more than $400,000 in federal special education grant funds for autism services, most of it specifically for the secondary level. The money is paying for additional autism consultants, three special education teachers, a vocational training assistant, a social skills trainer and a couple of instructional assistants.

Several middle and high schools offer social skills classes for students with autism, sometimes involving non-special education students as peer mentors. Instructional assistants and specialists work with kids one on one and in small groups at schools throughout the district.

"We have a lot of kids who do just fine in a regular setting," said Marilyn Clotz, the district's assistant superintendent for secondary education. "But we were seeing over a period of time more and more who were not."

Those kids were the impetus for Path Finder, which - with a staff of two full-time teachers and five instructional assistants, as well as visiting specialists - takes a big chunk of the money allocated for autism this year.

When inclusion doesn't work

A modular building with ample, grassy grounds, uncluttered classrooms and vistas of west Eugene, Path Finder is an ideal location for the purpose, head teacher Seth Pfaefflin said. There are two classrooms, a recreation room, a cafeteria, an office and two small, windowless "sensory rooms" equipped with beanbag chairs, cushions, a mini-trampoline, a bongo chair and a rocker chair. Students may retreat there whenever they feel the need to decompress; teachers and aides also usher them there for "time outs" for misbehavior.

Students have instruction in math, science, psychology, language arts and P.E., which lately has consisted of either a nature walk on nearby trails or a round of makeshift disc golf on the grounds.

On a recent afternoon, each of the three students in Pfaefflin's math class had either a teacher or instructional assistant to work with one on one. David Walters and Tyler Hubble worked from math texts, while a third student worked with Pfaefflin on his "stock portfolio," a class project in which all the students choose how they would invest $10,000 and track the stocks' progress in the newspaper.

"It's intensely individual," said Pfaefflin, a soft-spoken 30-year-old who treats his sometimes difficult charges with respect, affection and seemingly limitless patience. "It's not a cookie-cutter program. ... It's a different way of looking at inclusion."

Later in the day, the students gathered for psychology class, the main point of which is to help build social skills, such as the ability to carry on a give-and-take conversation.

Pfaefflin asked each to talk about the previous weekend and to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10.

David Walters, who had gone to the Ducks game and played video games, gave his an enthusiastic 15.

On another morning, the students embarked on a two-week project to build a replica of a clay house in Mesopotamia. Pfaefflin showed the boys how to make small bricks using a cardboard mold, and asked them to mix their own clay from powder, water and straw.

"Oh, it smells nasty!" David said of the concoction, but that didn't stop him from plunging his hands into the mix.

Some of the students, including Tyler and David, spend their whole day at Path Finder. Others attend a regular high school or middle school or a private alternative program for part of the day, or work at internships they've landed through the program's vocational trainer.

The job experience is critical for Path Finder's older students, some of whom have already finished high school but need help with the transition to adulthood and independence.

A day at Path Finder inevitably includes difficult moments - sometimes many of them. On the same day the kids made clay bricks, one of the two girls in the program curled up and napped for a couple of hours after a lengthy tantrum. Zane Bowman, 16, fretted and grew defiant over a writing assignment from instructional assistant Josh Hankin-Foley.

"I have an idea but it's a personal one and it's going to take some time," the boy snapped.

Both David Walters and Tyler Hubble wound up in the sensory rooms repeatedly, and mostly not by choice. At one point, David said, "This school sucks compared to Kelly (Middle School)," and insisted on turning out the lights and closing the door. "I only get calm when there's no light at all," he said, explaining that he concocts a mental image of Transylvania, with dark skies and silence.

But David's mother, Lanette Walters, believes he's happy most days at Path Finder, and said he wakes up looking forward to school.

"I've been really nervous the past few years about what we were going to do about high school," she said. "He's kind of withdrawn, and that makes him kind of vulnerable, I guess. So there's been a lot of teasing."

After painful experiences in regular classrooms, she's relieved to have David in a small school setting with kids facing similar challenges.

Another parent, Nan Lester, who founded the Eugene-based Asperger Advocacy Coalition five years ago, praised the district for its eagerness to understand the needs of autistic children and its willingness to work with families on tailor-made, appropriate educational options such as Path Finder.

"After five years of very rigorous advocacy, I've gone from what was a very adversarial relationship to a really collaborative one," said Lester, whose 11-year-old son, Max, spends half his day at Path Finder. "They've really included our thoughts and ideas about what Max needs, and as a consequence, we've felt we can have a more hands-off approach."

Path Finder bucks the current norm in special education to include special-needs students within the regular classroom whenever possible, in hopes of erasing stigmas and better preparing them for the real world.

For these kids, that just didn't seem to be working, K.C. Clark said.

On a recent visit to the school, Clark peeked in the cafeteria and watched the kids smiling, talking and eating their lunch together. She said it warmed her heart.

"Is it better being at a school eating lunch by yourself and not being successful?" she said. "They're making friends here. Even if that's all we do this year, I'll be happy."

CAPTION(S):

David Walters sits back as he and teacher Neill Juilfs read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" during English class at Path Finder. Walters has bounced among several schools.