Anyone have any experience with the SCERTS model?

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We have just started on it in conjunction with our Education ministry (they suggested it). Also the paediatrician who diagnosed our sons Autism thought it was a very good programme while he was somewhat cool on ABA.

I don't know much else about any of these therapies, but the early goals for our son revolve around his passivity and trying to get him to engage more. So we have four goals for us as parents and four for him and we record daily what we try to do and what happens.

How old is your son? My daughter is recently diagnosed at 3 and we are also looking at a program based on the SCERTS model. Hopefully someone on WP will have some feedback for us.

I just took a look at the http://scerts.com/ website. I didn't read all of it, but overall it looks fine. Although, it seems to a bit vague in places.

For example, in the FAQ it has things like this:

BrookeBC my son is 3.5yrs.

Some astute comments there Tracker, the SCERTS is apparently a model..a framework so to speak so yeah it does seem quite vague. The people facilitating it are from our ministry of education so funded by the govt, they have put in some goals for us - both us and James, and we have been working on them, we fill out worksheets daily.

We are meeting them this week to I guess go over results. But yeah like you have said we really want to ask them some specifics such as how in hell we are going to potty train our son! The problems all stem from communication, he doesn't really have a lot, so thats what we are working on.

Thanks Nastromo, your son sounds just like my daughter with regards to the communication issues, potty training also add brushing teeth, getting dressed etc. etc. etc... if you figure out the potty training thing let me know!

I'm also lucky enough to live somewhere where ABA therapies and SCERTS therapies, OT, speech therapy, psychology, pediatrician etc. are available free of charge for my daughter. Gotta love universal early education and health care I'm doing research to find out which option is best and how much is needed. On one hand I'm so thankful to have options, but on the other hand I have no idea what options are best and I don't want to overwhelm my kid with too much, she's just turned 3 for goodness sakes.

The specialists who diagnosed her were no help, they gave us standard routine, "you know your child best so you need to do what you think will be best for your child"

Makes me want to say, "Thank you for stating the obvious!". Seriously, I need some practical advise and feedback on these options cause as everyone keeps stressing the decisions we make over the next few years will impact her for her whole life, and yet none of the specialists want to put themselves out on a limb by actually making a recommendation.

We are moving across provinces and we have some beaurocrary to contend with so my daughter likely won't start any services for a couple of months, meanwhile we're on the waitlists for everything imaginable and it's getting to be crunch time where we actually have to make some decisions!

If you don't mind, maybe you can update WP on how you are finding your sons SCERTS program in a few months. I love WP, it's been the most helpful resource I've found. Good luck with everything!

I agree BrookeBC WP is one of the best resources for people like us.
I will keep you updated on how we get on with this SCERTS..

We too are looking at what might be best in terms of education, he gets a teacher aide starting next month who will be working wiht him at his preschool, I don't know what she will be doing yet, but the skills could be variable as they don't pay much, they are typically unqualified people who work with kids with learning disabilities. In other words they could be anywhere from brilliant to worse than useless!

The paediatric team and ministry are a bit luke warm on ABA. They were both keen on this SCERTS. Nonetheless in my sons case he is pretty low functioning, i.e. has extremely limited language (single words, never spoken to us, hardly ever used), very limited communication in general, has never pointed, never looks where we point, cant indicate choices, can't indicate what he is thinking or feeling. And while I can understand the reservations some of the people on this site have about ABA I do think it might be suited to him more so than a high functioning kid where they are trying to modify social behaviour (if only ).

I had a good look at the Rethink Autism site, which is designed to coach parents through doing your own ABA type exercises.
They seem genuine and it actually looks pretty good to me although again I had a reservation about one of the therapists shown in the videos, totally over the top and shouting and a bit phoney. I'm sure thats half the problem with ABA, to me the empathy of the therapist and the understanding they have of the individual child would seem to be extremely important.
So thats why we might be interested in doing it ourselves, it would be a major commitment in time, but this is my little mans future we are talking about.

Sometimes I feel like giving up, but gotta keep getting up off the canvas.
Hardest thing I've faced.

We met with the facilitators of the SCERTS programme for James. We mentioned our concerns with SCERTS (i.e. seems non specific, a bit vague, might be better things out there) and that we had considered ABA.

The way they explained the SCERTS programme to us is that it is holistic, and looks at all aspects of the child's development. It looks to understand the child's interests and responsiveness and uses this as an aide to facilitate learning. It brings in learning methods and techniques at points and times where required. E.g. they are coming to us in a few weeks to teach us on and initiate James with the techniques for using PECS. They record the child's development in all his and our goals and feed that back into the programme using a marking system to reassess where to/what to do next.

The said that in their experience ABA delivers skills that often can't be generalised by the child, or used in different contexts. They also talked about their experience where it didn't seem to even make progress, e.g. someone spending a lot of money on a child over six months for no result.
Where as they had/have seen strong progress with the SCERTS model with some of the children they had been working with.

I take all that with a grain of salt, however I do have faith in these people and our paediatrician's judgement and experience. So we are going to go with it and do the best job of working with them that we can and see what happens.

Thanks for the update Nastromo

We've been using PECS now for about 6 months and it has really helped with our daughters speech development. The teacher at daycare started us on to it. She doesn't have any formal training other than what the rest of the daycare staff has, but she's been doing it for years and wow she really understands kids, she's been a life saver. We use a software program called BoardMaker to make the PECS pictures. I hope you son will have the same success with it! I'm looking forward to get going with our daughters SCERTS program so we can learn more on how to effectively use the PECS. We also do a bit of signing which helps as well.

Best of luck and keep us posted on how its going, take care

I stumbled on a good summary of ASD therapies on the Autism Speaks site (I got there through google, I had actually never been directly to the site as apparently its run by Dark Lords of the Sith and must be avoided ). Has a good blurb on SCERTS

http://www.autismspeaks.org/whattodo/index.php