New Naperville school helps students with autism

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Twelve-year-old Eion Jiongco doesn’t speak, but he was a social butterfly at his family’s Easter get-together.

He shared the game console he was excited about, and he stayed to socialize with family members long past the time he normally would retreat to a quieter room. His grandmother was amazed. And his father, Chuck Jiongco, said he had noticed changes each day since sending Eion to Turning Pointe Therapeutic Day School, a private school in Naperville for kids with autism.

“They were really able to get more from him (in 4 1/2 months) than in the 4 1/2 years the public school had him,” Jiongco said.

Turning Pointe Autism Foundation’s day school opened in January with an academic and life skills program for six students ages 9 to 13. It includes a main classroom, computer lab, tutoring room, sensory room, life skills kitchen, life skills bedroom, speech therapy room, staff offices and a leisure area for after-school and evening social programs.

In addition to special-education classroom teachers, the program offers one-on-one paraprofessionals to help children with autism work through their individual challenges.

“For his small approximation of words, he has to type,” Jiongco said of Eion. “For him, a sentence can take five or six minutes to get out, and you need someone who’s patient … and public schools don’t always have that time. If a writing assignment takes 40 minutes, they’ll take 40 minutes.”

Grand plan

For now, the school holds classes in a former townhome building that sits alone on a long cul-de-sac off Plainfield Naperville Road north of 104th Street. Turning Pointe plans to fill in that cul-de-sac with a school building for educational and vocational programs, special needs recreation center with a lap pool, a respite home and six duplex homes.

Ultimately, the Naperville Turning Pointe community is meant to be a model for other similar developments throughout the nation, according to Executive Director Drew Glassford.

“It is very exciting and rewarding to see the difference we are making and futures we are creating for our children impacted by autism,” he wrote in the foundation’s latest newsletter. “With the help of our many generous supporters, we are now putting in place the programs and initiatives that have made us an innovator and will make Turning Pointe a national resource for other communities and organizations to emulate.”

Building success

An estimated 1 in 110 U.S. children is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder — autism, Asperger disorder or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. The prevalence of ASDs grew 57 percent between 2002 and 2006, partly because of increased awareness but possibly due to an actual increase in risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Teaching those kids today is stretching the public school system; employing those adults in the future is going to stretch the business community, the Turning Pointe Autism Foundation predicts. Thus, the day school focuses on academics but also social skills such as self-regulation, job skills such as working with a computer, and life skills such as how to take care of yourself at home.

Jiongco drives his son from Northbrook to Naperville every school day. It’s a 50-minute commute each way, but Jiongco said the time and money are worth it. He just wishes the school had opened sooner.

“We hope with the success of the program, Eion’s success will match it,” he said. “He’ll never talk, and that’s something my wife and I are OK with. But he has some skills hopefully he’ll increase upon, and the school will help him increase upon, and he will be able to do almost anything.”