PRESTONSBURG — Will Kinzer was a "quiet, happy, good baby," said his mother, Moriah Kinzer. He started talking on schedule, eventually saying words like mama, dada, cookie.
Kinzer said she thought it was cute at first when her son rocked himself side-to-side, looking at nothing in particular.
Those are classic autism symptoms.
When a barrage of tests at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital confirmed autism, Kinzer said, it still shocked her. "You feel like you've lost your child. You lose your hopes and dreams for that child," she said.
With ABA, speech therapy and specialized tools like a letter board to spell words, Mitch asks questions and communicates what he wants.
The Kinzers and the Wilsons were not willing to accept that such treatment was not available to their community.
Public school officials say that, as awareness has grown in the last decade, they have come a long way in teaching children with autism. In Kentucky schools, some special education programs incorporate ABA methods. But no method is a "magic bullet" for everyone, said Eddy Wilder, special education coordinator at the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, which helps 15 public school districts, including Floyd County, train teachers, aides and parents.
Wilder said that 112 students among those 15 districts' 38,000 have the primary disability of autism, and the schools' main focus is on the student's education, not on a particular program or on one parent's or doctor's opinion.
"We have to look first at whether the kid can be in a regular classroom," Wilder said. "We guarantee that right."
In May 2008, the Wilsons and Kinzers approached Highlands, a non-profit hospital in Prestonsburg, and after an exploratory trip to Cleveland the hospital decided to develop a program modeled after the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Autism.
The hospital has committed to fund the school's operation for the first two years, said hospital president Harold Warman. After that, he hopes funding will come through tuition, donations and charitable giving.
Eventually, Warman said, he hopes the school will grow into a diagnostic and community outreach center, giving families a place to go besides Louisville, Huntington or Cincinnati, and providing support and training to public schools.
The school's high cost will likely mean that kids will come from around the country, not just from Kentucky, where the most insurance coverage required of any provider is $500 a month for an autistic child.
Deskins, a clinical psychologist trained at the University of Kentucky and Auburn University, said it is a dream come true for her to be able to build a center from the ground up and to give Eastern Kentucky families access to evidence-based autism intervention. While an undergraduate at UK, she became a believer in ABA's scientific methods.
"I've seen it work," Des kins said.
No child will be turned away based on behavioral problems, Deskins said.
The Highlands school will have a certified teacher, helping create education plans for students. But the school's focus is behavioral, and the school's one-on-one therapists will come from a variety of disciplines — education, behavior analysis, speech pathology — and will be trained at the Cleveland Clinic.
The school's goal, Deskins said, is to move children into a classroom setting.
That is what the Wilsons want. They dream that Mitch — who now gets behavioral therapy at the Summit Center and neuro-developmental and academic education at another Atlanta school, Jacob's Ladder — will attend Highlands and eventually graduate from a public high school in a "regular" classroom.
"He will be an advocate" for other autistic children, Margaret Wilson said.