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>> Claudia Dunaway: The partnership
between San Diego Unified School District
and Florida State University was many years in the making,
and there were several primary reasons.
I think the most important one is
that we have a very innovative staff
that adheres to best practices.
And the second was that the District moved
to a more inclusive model for students with autism spectrum.
And so many speech pathologists knew about the work
of Barry Prizant and Amy Wetherby
and Amy Laurent and Emily Rubin.
And we were looking for a tool
that would help us make the shift in practice,
and we knew that the SCERTS Model would be important,
so we invited Emily Rubin to come down
and be a consultant for us.
And she came, and out of that relationship
when FSU got the grant, it naturally turned
to San Diego Unified to see
if we would be interested in participating.
>> Emily Rubin: With respect to this research grant
and how it looks in schools,
it's called the Classroom SCERTS Intervention and it's being led
by my colleagues, Dr. Amy Wetherby and Dr. Linda Morgan
at Florida State University.
It's a $3 million grant that was awarded by the U.S. Department
of Education and their Institute of Educational Sciences.
The districts that are participating
in this grant are San Diego Unified School District as well
as a number of districts from Calhoun, Leon,
and Volusia County, Florida.
The current project is focused on kindergarten-aged students
through about second grade,
and the participating schools are going
to be randomly assigned into two treatment groups.
One is obviously the treatment group
where the educational model is implemented,
and others are the controlled condition.
The SCERTS Model that is being tested is a comprehensive
educational framework, which differs
from more focused approaches that are looking
at particular symptoms or particular skills.
The comprehensive education framework targets the core
challenges of children with autism spectrum and those
that are most predictive of positive outcomes
in the longer term Those participating
in this particular study are going to be provided
with initial training as well as ongoing mentoring and follow-up
and coaching provided by Florida State University's grant
with the hope and the impetus
that we're building a sustainable model
for a public school system that can be implemented
for years beyond the influence of this particular grant.
>> Claudia Dunaway: I think it's critical that school districts
and universities form partnerships for research.
It's part of our professional responsibility,
and proximity really doesn't matter.
San Diego Unified School District has research
relationships with universities across the country,
and both groups have so much to gain.
Universities have access to diverse, large populations
of students, and they have very competent speech pathologists
who can collect the data for them,
and then school districts can determine what methods really
work in an education setting, and there's also a lot
of financial benefit that comes from the research funding.