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Health Profile: Horton specializes in helping autistic
September 9, 2009
By ESTELA VILLANUEVA-WHITMAN • The Des Moines Register Correspondent
Photo caption: Evelyn Horton, youth community services director for The Homestead, works with one of Adwoa Kesse, a program manager for the Homestead student working towards her BCaBA in her office on evaluating clients. Photo by: ANDREA MELENDEZ/THE REGISTER
Evelyn Horton, youth community services director for The Homestead, works with one of Adwoa Kesse, a program manager for the Homestead student working towards her BCaBA in her office on evaluating clients.
Evelyn Horton is one of a handful of board-certified behavior analysts in Iowa. She's the director of youth and community services for The Homestead in Pleasant Hill, the only program in the state offering services specifically for children with autism.
Horton said the number of professionals in her field is growing, as is the number of children with autism. Her department, which is always seeking additional staff members, serves 70 to 90 children a year, mostly in their homes.
Q. What's your professional background?
A. Originally, I was a classroom teacher in early childhood special education and elementary. The state of Missouri, where I am from, has a statewide training and consulting agency that is supported by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, so I became part of that training agency to help provide professional training for the state of Missouri. I've been in the field of autism for close to 20 years. Where we used to say one or two in 10,000 (children were affected,) we now say 1 in 150.
Q. What's your role at The Homestead?
A. I oversee all behavior plans and annual plans for every child. I also serve as behavior consultant for the youth home in Altoona and, additionally, do quite a bit of consulting with either families or other agencies similar to ours or school systems.
Q. What type of behavior do you commonly see among children with autism?
A. The actual list of behaviors that are specific to kids with autism starts with self-injurious behaviors, things like head banging, skin-picking until you bleed; sensory behaviors, which includes toe walking, fecal smearing.
We take a verbal behavior approach to applied behavior analysis. A lot of what we do is skill-building in the area of communication. We're working on other ways to communicate rather than using problem behaviors to communicate. We might be addressing the aggressive or self-injurious behavior or the lack of responding simply by teaching skills that then take that place.
Q. What's the best part of your job?
A. It's the variety. There's constantly staff and families who are celebrating successes and finding solutions to challenges. The nice piece of that is in behavior analysis you have the data to prove it.
About The Homestead
The Homestead is a private, non-profit organization that provides innovative solutions for children and adults with autism, their families and allied professionals. Services are provided in the community, in homes and in a unique agriculture based campus program. Autism is a neurological disorder that severely hinders the way information is gathered and processed causing problems in communication, learning and social skills. It occurs in roughly 1 of every 150 births.
For more information, contact
LuAnn Markley
Director of Operations
8272 NE University Avenue
Pleasant Hill, IA 50327
p515.967.4369
f888.228.8476
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