Word: higashi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...enrolled Nate in the Boston Higashi School in Randolph, Mass., because I knew he was now capable of more (though I had no idea what "more" was). After years of day school followed by speech, occupational and behavior therapy, Nate had no master plan connecting everything. And I constantly worried that his ritualistic behaviors--like his insistence on sitting in the same seat in the last row of the city bus and crawling over anyone to get there--were never going to decrease...
During Nate's first week at Higashi, I got a call from his teacher asking me to send a pair of sneakers with laces. Why does he need laces when there's Velcro?, I wondered. "Because learning to tie shoes is a life skill," his teacher told me. It was an "aha!" moment for me--the first of many. Higashi is committed to preparing students for lifelong inclusion in the community, so it sends the kids home, with detailed vacation goals, for eight weeks of the year. That way, they can generalize the lessons they learn in school...
...Higashi was founded by Dr. Kiyo Kitahara, a teacher who believed in searching out the "bud of self-identity" in every autistic child and fostering it with loving care. Her program, Daily Life Therapy, is more like Floortime than like ABA (see "A Tale of Two Schools") but takes its own unique approach. The first step is to get the child to develop a 24-hour rhythm through intense physical exercise. For example, a lot of autistic kids will eat only a few select foods, and many have difficulty sleeping through the night. At Higashi the kids jog twice...