Last year, our department witnessed many exciting developments. We expanded our Comprehensive Adolescent/Adult Preparation for a Better Life Experience (CAAPABLE) program, designed to help adolescent students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and learning and emotional challenges transition to adult living environments and services. Our department also published its four-year curriculum manual, S.O.S.: Social Skills in our Schools: A Transition Program for Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

In 2020, we began a partnership with the Vocational Independence Program (VIP) at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York, where we train and supervise college staff in the implementation of our S.O.S. transition program. In our continued effort to help adults with ASD learning and emotional challenges establish effective, independent lives, we added executive function coaching in the community to our offered group and individual therapies, which include social skills group, communication skills therapy, independent living skills and organizational skills therapy. These new executive coaching programs provide direct support in the workplace, in training programs and at home. 

Progress continued in the development of our Prosody Project, a treatment approach that develops vocal timbre and both verbal and nonverbal prosody in adolescents and adults with ASD, in order to remove significant obstacles to their social integration and vocational acceptance. Our book, Prosody Intervention for High-Functioning Adolescents and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder, originally published in 2016, was translated to Italian. Working with Dr. Vittore Mazzola, we are producing a webinar edition of Prosodia e Spettro Autistico for an Italian audience. We also developed methods for effective social skills intervention using a virtual format, which were used in the development of The Conversation Game, a game from Tired Dog Games designed to develop conversation skills in both children and adults.