Teaching Safety Skills at the QSAC Day School

Like all parents, parents with children with autism worry about their child’s safety. This can be much more stressful for parents the more severe the child’s disability. Unfortunately, teaching basic safety skills are often overlooked as focus on developing language, communication and social skills become the priority. Although some safety issues may be more controllable; such as ensuring a safe living environment, other issues, such as what to do when lost, may not be.

Firefighter George walking with our student

According to the Autism Wandering Awareness Alerts Response and Education Collaboration or AWWARE; “In a 2007 online poll through the National Autism Association, 92% of parents reported that their children with autism have a tendency to wander. In 2011, preliminary data from an Interactive Autism Network study found that almost half of all children wander.” In addition, “more than one third of ASD children who wander/elope are never or rarely able to communicate their name, address, or phone number; two in three parents of elopers reported their missing children had a ‘close call’ with a traffic injury; and, 32% of parents reported a ‘close call’ with a possible drowning.”

At the QSAC Dayschool, four teachers made this their focus at the beginning of the school year. The students ranged from severe language and communication skills deficits to students that required the use of assistive technology to communicate to verbal students with social skill deficits. When the teachers were posed with the question, “What would your student do if they were lost?” the answer wasn’t good. We were pretty sure most if not all of our students would not be able to identify who could help them or provide their personal information when requested. The teachers were asked to begin to develop a safety skills lesson that would be geared towards the individual needs of their students. This involved task analyzing the skill, that is, breaking down the skill into smaller, teachable steps and identifying the skills that their students needed to learn. For all of our students, we wanted to ensure that they would be able to relay their personal identification to a community helper. This was especially challenging for our students that didn’t have any communication skills. We thought it would be best if they carried an identification badge on them that could be easily accessed as needed. Although this may sound like a relatively simple solution, this was not an easy feat for our students who wouldn’t tolerate carrying anything on them. Our students were well aware of the badge’s presence and consistently attempted to remove them. With constant reinforcement for keeping it on for longer and longer durations of time, they were able to keep and tolerate these badges on them. Eventually, they were able to keep these on throughout the entire school day! For our other students that had more communication and language skills, we wanted them to be able to answer personal information either through verbal interaction or through their device. A lot of trials took place for our students to reliably answer their name, where they live, phone number and their age. Although some of our students were able to answer this already, they were able to do this under specific teaching contexts, i.e. during repeated trials, face to face with a teacher, using specific questions...etc. In other words, these skills were not generalized to other settings, other people or other instructional cues. 

The teachers, their assistants and the students worked long and hard on this and eventually, were ready for the ultimate test; we invited 3 different community helpers (a firefighter, police officer and EMT) to come in on separate visits to meet them. Although we have had community helpers visit some of our students in the past, we wanted this experience to be different for our students and from typical visits. 

Our community helper visitors were asked to greet and ask for the personal information from each student. For our students that wore badges, the visitors were asked to look at their badges and pretend to write their information down - something they did not tolerate in previous months. In addition, each classroom worked on additional skills for each of the visits. Some of our students were required to ask each visitor 1 question about what they do. With our EMT visitor, some students took turns reenacting an emergency situation. The students got a chance to learn what questions they might be asked in case of an emergency and how they might be expected to respond. Our EMT also placed band aids on the students of two of our classrooms, a major issue for many of our children.

EMT Ulsheimer reponding to an "emergency"

Each of our students responded extremely well to each of our visitors and some future goals for some of our students will be identifying a community helper when lost, asking for help, reading a map and walking in a group in the community. For children who have a history of wandering, teaching safety skills must also include learning triggers to wandering and ways to be proactive. Children who may wander to get to or get away from somewhere or something may need to learn to tolerate when they can’t have something or tolerate alternatives to things they want or to learn to request to get away from something. Teaching these basic skills is just the tip of the iceberg as we know this will be an ongoing process. As we head into the New Year, we hope that teaching safety skills becomes a priority for our families and teachers for a happy and safe 2012!

Thanks to Firefighter George, Officer Carroll and EMT Ulsheimer for all their help!

Visit the National Autism Association for more information on Autism and Wandering.

Create a Family Emergency Wandering Plan.