Residential & Social Life
Daniels Academy provides a safe and therapeutic boys’ boarding school environment where young men overcome past failures and learn to thrive through meaningful relationships and insightful coaching. Our home is a safe and predictable haven where anxiety is minimized so true learning can be done. This treatment for Autism Spectrum Disorder is primarily accomplished through authentic experiences in the local communities. We believe in giving our young men authentic life experiences in order to bridge the gap between treatment and home life.
Residential Life And The Four Pillars of Neuro-diversity Development
Emotional Regulation
At Daniels Academy, our residential staff’s main goal is to provide a safe and therapeutic environment for our young men. Teenage life can be difficult, especially while working through the challenges our students face. Each student creates a personal de-escalation plan with their therapist and then our caring staff provide meaningful relationships and insightful coaching for the students as they learn, practice, and master their specific emotional regulatory skills. Our boys’ boarding school maintains a true 3:1 student to staff ratio, above industry standards, to ensure each young man in our program can receive proper attention, care, and treatment for Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Social Learning
Navigating the social world is a major challenge for our young men, yet we believe this is a challenge they can learn to overcome. Daniels Academy’s community connection residential model has our boys’ boarding school students participating within the local Heber community every day. These daily immersions into the community provide authentic and unscripted social exchanges for our young men to practice and succeed with the aid of our residential staff. We believe authentic experience is the best experience – no contrived setting can replicate real life. Our program provides treatment for Autism Spectrum Disorder by utilizing concepts from Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking in order to help our young men better grasp the social world.
Executive Functioning
Properly taught and monitored habit formation provides the framework for executive function improvement. Creating new cognitive pathways requires three important factors: consistency, predictability, and routine.
The Daniels Academy program carefully provides these factors systematically throughout the scheduled day so habit formation can be possible. Weekly each student will have a specific, individualized, skill or habit they are working on establishing. Our staff are able to provide insightful feedback and provide vital information in tracking the progress of the specific skill or habit. This active learning model is widely recognized as the best course of treatment for Autism Spectrum Disorder for our young men.
Daily Living Skills
Life skill development is a step by step process; one must walk before they can run. Our boys’ boarding school individualized program has staff meeting students where they are at and working side-by-side from there. Simple skills such as personal hygiene up to more challenging skills such as finding employment are addressed and practiced at Daniels Academy. We believe our young men are capable of living productive and fulfilling lives if vital life skills can be mastered. Our staff aid in skill mastery by providing timely feedback and insightful coaching in a program built upon student buy in.
