Innovative High School Education for the Autism Spectrum
In September 2004, New Roads School opened its doors to the Spectrum Program, an innovative high school program for students with social-cognitive learning disabilities such as high-functioning autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, NLD, and the like.

Our program takes a fresh approach by reordering traditional academic expectations to give priority to the true needs of our students in the areas of social, communication, and life skills. To this end, and with the cooperation and collaboration of renowned professionals from the community, from UCLA and from Yale, we are developing and implementing a unique curriculum, aimed not just at teaching our students a set of isolated “skills” but rather focused on improving the coherence of their thinking, their understanding of others and the world around them.
The Program
To the extent of their individual abilities and desires, our students participate in the mornings, in a fully inclusive manner, in the regular academic program offered at New Roads. They are supported in these endeavors by our two fulltime, highly trained Spectrum Program teachers who provide academic assistance, help with organization, and additional interface with other New Roads faculty. Every afternoon, during the time allotted for electives at New Roads, our students are immersed in our unique narrative-based curriculum designed to help them improve the coherence and fluidity of their thinking and behavior.
Our narrative curriculum relies on some “traditional” reading and writing, but more often employs non-traditional modalities such as drama, film, community outings, etc. to encourage the students to attend to verbal and nonverbal signals, nuances of setting, context, plot, and character; in effect, the “storyline” of day-to-day life. We film the students ourselves, on a daily basis, both as part of their own activities and also as a means of monitoring the effectiveness of our interventions and measuring student progress over time. In this we are assisted by graduate students at UCLA who are “coding” our video footage in an attempt to gather valid, objective data.
Board of Advisors
David Bryan, MS, JD, Ph.D. (New Roads, Head of School), Paul Cummins, Ph.D. (New Visions Foundation), Stanley Greenspan, M.D. (George Washington University), Lorie Humphrey, Ph.D. (Private Practice), Martha Jura, Ph.D. (University of California Los Angeles), Connie Kasari, Ph.D. (University of California Los Angeles), Ami Klin, Ph.D. (Yale University), James McCracken, M.D. (University of California Los Angeles), Daniel Siegel, M.D., (University of California Los Angeles), Jeff Wood, Ph.D. (University of California Los Angeles)

information, please contact:
Nancy London
Program Coordinator310-828-5582 (Tel. 1)
310-828-6561 (Tel. 2)
nlondon@newroads.org