As you know, Evey Sobczak is beginning to provide additional parent training for all of our families. This training will also be available to families whose children are not currently attending ABA at our centers, but we want to prioritize increased treatment for our current families. Here are some areas that Evey could help you with:

• Potty training
• Eating
• Sleep difficulties
• Sibling relationships
• Challenging behavior at home
• Extended caregiver support and training - for babysitters, grandparents, anyone who spends a lot of time with your child!
• Communication
• Increasing independence

These are just a few of the areas that Evey can help you with, so please start thinking about how this would help your family and let Evey know what you need.

Please remember that our Friday end time will be 2:20 for full day children until further notice. Our team will continue to remind you at drop off on Friday morning, but this will be the standard until our cleaning and toy rotating practices change drastically. That extra hour makes it possible for our staff to thoroughly clean everything your child has used for the week, and rotate the toys to another child for the next week. We appreciate your continued understanding.

Please remember that we did revise our regular illness policy to include a "72 hour symptom free" condition for any symptoms. Our previous policy required 24 hours symptom free without medication, but we have increased this to 72 hours symptom free with medication, since returning to therapy in June.

The purpose behind this is to ensure that only healthy individuals are in our building at all times. When children attend therapy with "just a cold" our staff catch that cold too. When our staff have any symptoms on our daily health screening, they end up either going for a COVID test or missing many days of work while we wait to ensure they are safe to return.

We definitely want to maximize your child's hours in treatment, but we need to do so only when they are healthy. Please help us out by abiding by the 72 hours symptom free requirement for any illness. We are absolutely not counting these absences "against" you in any way.

As you know, we typically schedule the same therapist(s) with your child for about 3 months at a time. With our return to therapy taking place at the beginning of June, it has put us in a spot where our therapist switch time will be a little more than 3 months in either the summer or the fall. In each center, we will switch therapists in September, but the exact date might vary a bit. We are currently planning to switch therapists in Burton toward the beginning of the month, and in Brighton toward the end of the month.

We switch therapists for a number of reasons, including:

• Ensuring that your child's skills generalize - making sure he can demonstrate all his skills with any adult
• Increasing your child's tolerance for change and flexibility
• Keeping it fun and interesting for your child - a new therapist brings a fun new perspective to the day to day routine
• Increasing our therapist's skills - by working with a wide variety of children with different needs, our therapists are always learning something new that will help every child

Once we switch in September, we expect that most of our therapists will remain with those children until January, when we switch again. Sometimes we will keep a therapist and child together for two quarters (6 months) when it’s in the best interest of the child. Your BCBA can answer any questions you have about a therapist switch.

The Autism Alliance of Michigan (AAOM) is hosting their annual gala on Friday, September 18th. This black tie affair is usually held in the spring, but the organization held off until the fall and has now decided to go virtual. The AAOM provides a lot of support for families affected by Autism and for organizations like ours who work with those families. In order to show our support for the AAOM, each Strive Center location will purchase an appetizer level ticket to the gala and raffle it off to one of our interested families!

The appetizer level ticket will include charcuterie, fromage, chocolate drizzled popcorn, and wine. All items will be delivered directly to your home via contact-less delivery. The ticket also includes access to the AAOM's live virtual broadcast on the evening of Friday, September 18th.

In order to enter the raffle, please use the RSVP button at the end of the newsletter, under AAOM Virtual Gala. Please contact Amy Hund at ahund@sc-centers.com with any questions regarding the raffle. The winner will be drawn on Thursday, September 3rd, and announced in the September 4th newsletter.

For more info on the event, please watch this video: https://youtu.be/mfKD0arwvsw

Email: info@sc-centers.com
Website: www.sc-centers.com
Location: Burton and Brighton, MI
Phone: 810-344-8082