Services

Therapy

CAAS provides a relationship-based therapy for children with autism. 

• Our therapy style requires the adult providing intervention to get down on the floor to play and interact with the child at their level.

• The goal is for adults to help children expand their "circles of communication." 

• They meet the child at their developmental level and build on their strengths.

• Therapists and caregivers engage children through the activities each child enjoys. They enter the child's games. They follow the child's lead.

Social Skills Training

Social skills are the rules, customs, and abilities that guide our interactions with other people and the world around us. In general, people tend to "pick up" social skills the same way they learn language skills: naturally and easily. Over time they build a social "map" of acting in situations and with others.

For people with autism, it can be harder to learn and build up these skills, forcing them to guess what the social "map" should look like. 

Social skills development for people with autism involves:

• Direct or explicit instruction and "teachable moments" with practice in realistic settings

• Focus on timing and attention

• Support for enhancing communication and sensory integration

• Learning behaviors that predict important social outcomes like friendship and happiness

• A way to build up cognitive and language skills

Caregiver Training

Caregiver training could be sharing details of behavioral goals with the caregivers, teaching the caregiver during a therapy session, and observing the caregivers implementing compliance training and providing feedback….it could even be as simple as making recommendations to the family about behavioral supports in the home, such as posting a visual schedule, modeling play-therapy to the caregivers using items at home.

Comprehensive Multi-Disciplinary Evaluation (CMDE)

Here at CAAS, we do Comprehensive multi-disciplinary evaluations (CMDEs), which is an EIDBI service that evaluates a person on:

• Their eligibility as well as their level of need for EIDBI services, and

• Develop a person's individual treatment plan (ITP).

CMDEs must be done before the person starts services and at least once every three years (or when necessary) to assess the person on any changes to their condition, their diagnosis needs to be reevaluated and other causes.