Thank You GCN for Featuring The Adaptive Learning Center

Thank you to the Georgia Center for Non-profits for featuring inclusion in their October 2019 newsletter.

All-Inclusive
ADAPTIVE LEARNING LEARNS TO ADAPT

Research shows that all children benefit from a learning environment that brings together students with and without disabilities. That’s why The Adaptive Learning Center (ALC) has, for more than 20 years, matched highly skilled special education professionals with children with disabilities, providing one-one-one support so they can succeed in typical preschools, learning side-by-side with their peers. Until recently, however, the program’s expense meant that only families with means could afford it.

ALC’s first opportunity to reach lower-income children came in a pilot partnership with Our House, which serves families experiencing homelessness. The stress of transitional housing can especially affect children with developmental delays and disabilities, and Our House found they had many children who needed additional classroom support. ALC worked with Our House to implement a more flexible model of their program. The success of the pilot readied them to partner with other organizations.

One of those partners was Frazer Center, an inclusive early education center that caters to the needs of working families. Frazer Center approached ALC looking for a way to equip its teachers with more sophisticated early intervention skills and provide a higher level of service to children. Working together, ALC and Frazer Center developed a new consultation-based approach: Two ALC Inclusion Consultants spent time in Frazer Center classrooms, creating individualized support plans for children and coaching teachers in implementing them.

Frazer Center reports “tremendous” results for students and teachers, and rave reviews from parents. For ALC, the new model – offered through their Preschool Inclusion Program – gives them the chance to reach children they were unable to serve in the past, and a way to scale their work: each ALC consultant can now support exponentially more students than in the traditional one-on-one model.