One of the first programs in the country aimed at helping college students with autism and other forms of neurodiversity just received a large donation aimed at helping it serve even more people.
In 2016, the University of Maryland began its Social Interaction Group Network for All (SIGNA) program with just a handful of students. Now, a $1 million donation will help the program expand beyond offering help to students who need it to get through college, to include help as they transition from school to employment.
“It is extremely important,” said Kathy Dow-Burger, director of Neurodiversity and Autism Transition Services at UMD. “We have some students who, if they didn’t have our support, they probably, within the first two weeks of school, may not continue.
“Transitions are particularly tough for neurodivergent people. And so understanding routines, the new smells around the dorm, the dining hall, the expectation to interact with a new roommate or with other people in class — those expectations are high. And so for some students, if they didn’t have the support … sometimes they just disappear, they may drop out, or they may have a very reduced course load and their college experience is much different than what they anticipated.”
Students involved in the program don’t disclose it until they’ve already been accepted to the university just as any other student.
“They get four hours of support each week, they have a one-to-one coach, who’s a speech pathology graduate student that they meet twice weekly with. They’re assigned their own peer mentor who kind of meets them boots-on-the-ground around campus,” she said.
Students are also part of a social skills group.
“They get different ways to be able to learn skills and to practice them,” Dow-Burger said. “They take their regular classes, and they’re living in the dorms or they’re commuters, but they also have this as an ‘extra’ where it helps support some of their other learning needs.”
About 15-20% of the U.S. population is considered neurodivergent, according to the National Cancer Institute’s Divison of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics. The category includes those not with just autism, but someone who has ADHD, anxiety, depression or who stutters, among other challenges.
While the program isn’t big enough to help 15-20% of the entire campus, Dow-Burger said “it gives us a platform to be able to communicate to other parts of the university to make sure that our students have access to all programming and support.”
There’s also hope that it can expand its mental health offerings to students who rely on the program to succeed in college.
“Mental health is a hot issue in society right now, on college campuses, in particular,” she said. “But then you add a mix of neurodivergency into that, and you have high needs to support our students to be able to work with maybe some anxiety or depression that they’re experiencing.”
The donation came from Martin Friedman, a 1992 graduate with a neurodivergent daughter. His family also donated $500,000 to the program just a few years ago. Without their generosity, “I think it would have been just a small program that was just making a little bit of a difference,” said Dow-Burger. “But now we’ve just got so much more room to grow.”
