At Norris Academy, our primary goals for every residents who comes to our program are simple: Provide exceptional safety and structure.  Through our onboarding and ongoing training efforts, all professional staff at Norris Academy are taught strategies to keep our residents engaged to most effectively support emotional and behavioral wellness.  Due to the unique needs of our residents, structure is a critical part of our efforts to make therapeutic change for the children that we serve.  For more information on how our program is structured, click here.

Specific interventions, such as teaching practices and approaches, behavioral management techniques, strategies for emotional support, and activities intended to foster social and communication competence, are implemented in a consistent (across settings, staff members, and situations) and individualized manner. Norris Academy utilizes a variety of optimal treatment approaches and embraces the wide range of expression and complexity of the neurodevelopmental disorders, avoiding commitment to a singular clinical model in favor of practical, individualized, and common sense clinical judgment.  Based on the needs of our residents, treatment approaches may include (but is not limited to):

• Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)
• Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT)
• Picture Exchange Communication (PECS)
• Errorless Learning
• Sensory Integration

Our group living staff become a critical part of the implementation of these techniques due to their hands-on, experiential process with our residents.  Our residents and staff develop strong bonds with one another, which helps facilitate the therapeutic growth process, assists with engagement in challenging interventions and teaches residents about the value of social/emotional reciprocity.

Handle With Care

At Norris Academy, all staff members in the program are trained in Handle With Care, a crisis prevention and intervention model that emphasizes a continuum of prevention and de-escalation strategies for responding to unsafe behaviors. Handle With Care emphasizes a least restrictive intervention framework to help support our residents from a place of prevention by offering support and guidance before the crisis can begin.  Norris Academy worked hard to be both trauma-informed and trauma-competent and using a model that evidences the importance of considering the influence of a child’s trauma on how they respond to their environment.