This program is not for the faint of heart. Participants will have to make a two-year commitment to complete it as part of a true partnership among your district, your teachers, and Project ACCESS. Here are a few important features worth mentioning:
  • Classroom coaching is perhaps the single most important feature of the training. The goal of coaching sessions is to instill each skill into the repertoire of each teacher’s ongoing professional practice. We'll help you use skills with fidelity with real students.
  • Completers will earn a Project ACCESS Autism Credential (PAAC) and DESE will publish a list of PAAC recipients on the DESE website. Although the program is designed for teachers responsible for students' IEPs, we recently decided to expand the program to include all other credentialed or certified service personnel (this includes all IDACs). For those folks not responsible for IEP minutes, we have developed a companion program that we are calling Project ACCESS Autism Team Support (PAATS). PAATS participants will receive the same training as PAAC, just without the classroom coaching.
  • The program is delivered through five localized cohorts across the state. Training occurs twice a month in the cohort school buildings. Currently we've planned 3-hour after school sessions, so that the educational day is not interrupted but cohorts can optionally meet during the school day if administrators in the cohort schools support it.
  • The program leverages a flipped instructional model with additional "content knowledge" lessons that are online. The in-person sessions are dedicated to skill development of the kind that teachers value most: creating real products that you can use in your classroom right away.
  • Lessons are competency-based and include lessons for most of the evidence-based practices in the Missouri Autism Guidelines Initiative that are applicable to the classroom. 
  • Since many of the interventions fall under the umbrella of applied behavior analysis, completers will leave with a strong foundation in ABA skills.
  • The level of commitment will be akin to taking a single graduate college course each semester for four semesters. Up to 12 hours of graduate credit will be available as an option for participants, and at a reduced rate through Missouri State University! We are working with Missouri State University College of Education, Department of Special Education to integrate course credit into a graduate certificate program or masters degree in special education with an autism emphasis.
  • Best of all, the training and coaching components are free. There will be a fee ($250 per participant, per semester) to cover books and materials, coaches travel expenses, and participant participation in a few statewide meetings, but in our humble opinion, this will be the best bang for the buck you can experience in PD. At these statewide 1-day or 2-day "conferences" Project ACCESS will be bringing nationally known presenters to speak or provide training at no cost to participants.