As Time Goes By.....

As this decade draws to a close, I can't say I'm particularly sorry to see it end. What with 9/11, Enron, unnecessary wars, state and federal budget fiascos, the Wall Street mess, obscene executive compensations, political inertia, and terrorism lurking around every bend, I say good riddance to a miserable era.

While the world was falling apart, this was a very eventful decade for me. I took over my position as Executive Director of the Morgan Autism Center in 2000, after 23 years working as both a teacher and program director. This was not a planned transition and took some time adjusting to the suddenness of it. Along with my change in position, the program needed to move to a different site after 21 years in Los Altos, but had not yet identified that site, with time quickly running out. This was just before the dotcom crash, so prices were still sky high. While searching desperately for the new place, we were also going through our three year state certification review, which is a two day intense ordeal that takes months to prepare for.

During this same time, I lost my oldest sister to breast cancer, and my family had to move my mother to an assisted living home for her increasingly severe dementia. Then, miraculously, and with just a few months left before the school would be forced to camp out God knows where or close, we found the church in Santa Clara in May of 2001 and moved that June, surprising all of us as to how resilient our students were.

We were at first very grateful to have found the place in Santa Clara, but as the economy crashed for the first time in the decade, we began looking for a more suitable space and found that at our current site, the old Cory Elementary school in the San Jose Unified School district. Here, we have much more room (although there is never enough!), and we've been able to expand our program offerings to include on site trainings and workshop opportunities.

Back to the beginning of the decade, after we found the church site, it was blatantly obvious that in our position as long time service providers for people with autism, we had the opportunity to take the leadership role in educating the greater community in understanding autism and offering information about effective interventions both medical and educational. The numbers of people being diagnosed with autism continued to rise and very few organizations had our longtime perspective of how to work best with these people. So, with our ongoing collaboration with Santa Clara University, 2010 will mark our 9th Annual Autism Conference. We have provided six to eight workshops/lectures each year, in-services to public schools, consultations to schools both public and private, parent support and information, teacher practicum support, pediatric rotations of residents from Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, in addition to the direct consultations we have with San Jose Unified School District and Santa Cruz County Office of Education. We have affected thousands of families through the expansion of our services.

So, while the economy flounders once again, and the state and federal government remain dysfunctional and paralyzed, we have no choice but to hope for better times in 2010! It can't possibly get much worse.