"What Now" Project

Newsletter #2
First Meeting Success!
We are pleased to announce that our first meeting was attended by 18 people; a very respectable number considering the date of 4th January!!! Many thanks again go to Pippa Sweet of Giant Steps Sydney for squeezing in her inspiring presentation on a tight schedule, and to Silvana Gaglia of Autism West for having us aboard.
We were privileged to have Kathy Ziatas, highly respected speech pathologist in Perth’s ‘Autism World’, join us and encourage us to move forward with our plans to help this group of children find a place where their special needs can be well catered for; a place where they can feel that they belong.
We found the meeting to be very beneficial to us and we hope that all who attended got something from it.
We thank all who contributed, especially Jordan, who was able to articulate his feelings and give parents of
non-verbal children an insight into the possible feelings of their own children. We received additional support from a number of new sources, especially Roxana Jackson, Course coordinator at Central TAFE. We are most grateful to all those who sent encouraging feedback and offers of continuing support.
Our heads have been spinning ever since, however, we have managed to keep a forward direction!!! We
have written the term plans for our two boys and are preparing ourselves for more. We are excited to
move ourselves in to Autism West for the 1st February and have a wonderful little shopping list of things to
acquire for our cooking days and for a quiet time area.
We are looking at resources such as The Best of Coping Program and the Adaptive Living Skills Curriculum and have identified a number of people who we would love to have working with us. We are feeling very excited as to what we can offer children with ASD.
We have looked into:
1) registration of a small training organisation,
2) registration of a non-government school for Year 11 and 12,
3) registration of a non-government school for Year 1-12,
and we are looking into the possibility of registering a full school and RTO in one go.
Registration of a Full ASD School So now the fun really begins!
For the commencement of 2011 we need:
1) to find a larger location
2) committed teachers and other staff (we think we have found quite a number of these already)
3) expressions of interest in enrolment (we think we have found quite a number of these already too!)
4) funding, and
5) to fill in a few thousand forms!!!
Too easy! Well, OK, we have work to do! So without further ado, we wish you all a Happy New Year, and
look forward to your continuing support,

Thea and Caroline

www.springboardcafe.org