Virtual Care

Virtual Care: Outreach Services to Nebraska Schools

In response to the disparity in services and teacher training, experts at the Munroe-Meyer Institute (MMI), in collaboration with Autism Action Partnership, have begun a pilot project to show that highly effective and empirically supported interventions can be implemented with high fidelity in rural and urban schools by leveraging the latest web-based technologies. Our long-term goal is to show that our web-based training and consultation procedures can be effectively and efficiently used to improve services to many students with autism when they are implemented on a large scale.

Our goals are to use effective and preferred school-based services for students with autism in Omaha and to provide innovative solutions by addressing the following primary barriers:

• most teachers receive little or no didactic training in teaching students with autism using the principles of applied behavior analysis (ABA); and
• there is a shortage of autism experts available to develop and monitor behavioral interventions with teachers.

As a result, most students with autism do not receive the most effective interventions currently available.