STAR Program Introduction

The STAR program has been very popular with Arkansas school districts.  If your local school district or early childhood classroom has started an autism program this year, it’s probably STAR.

The STAR autism program comes from Oregon and was published in 2004. STAR would usually be seen in preschool and elementary school programs, but after that point the child with autism would graduate to a different program by the same authors, FACTER. Older, more disabled children with autism could continue to use STAR.

Oregon is not a particularly wealthy or poor, only 23^rd in the U.S. for per capita income, while Arkansas is 46^th for per capita income.  Eastern Oregon is also very isolated and rural, thus duplicating the rural nature of Arkansas. The Portland State University writers of the curriculum have also developed RPATS, 32 regional training centers for elementary school autism educators, disabled students and their families.

In Oregon the STAR curriculum is used in regional centers throughout the state that work to teach neighboring schools the STAR techniques. Oregon also has a variety of classroom settings for special education, including reverse mainstream classrooms, where normal children learn alongside special needs children.  However, Oregon provides its STAR program as an educational expense, not a Medicaid waiver treatment. Oregon has no autism Medicaid waiver such as is being developed by Arkansas.

STAR incorporates some of the more popular autism teaching techniques: discrete trial, pivotal response training, and functional behavior routines in a curriculum that also includes basic academic learning such as counting and letter recognition. STAR could be the complete day of a child with autism. At the same time STAR makes it very easy for an educator to take only specific sections or even one or two skills for a student.

The STAR program primarily meets the needs of preschool children. The Program has three levels, from Level I of STAR teaches completely non-verbal children, all the way up to Level III for children with two word vocabularies to learn prepositions, read a simple story, tell time, and play interactively with peers. Level III corresponds with the skills a typical child would learn by the end of kindergarten.

In a later article I’ll detail the Arkansas Easter Seals training program, as well as the pros and cons of the STAR curriculum.  I hope that interested parents can order the assessments and DVD directly to gain further knowledge of the new autism curriculum.

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Comments

[Terri]

Thanks for the info!

[Eye Contact Arkansas]

You're welcome.