The Center on Disability and Development at Texas A&M provides recreational camping experiences for disabled children and their siblings.
(College Station)—A Center on Disability and Development (CDD) has been established at Texas A&M University to narrow the gap between children and adults with disabilities such as mental retardation, dyslexia and autism, and those without.
The center is part of a national network of University Centers for Excellence in Development Disabilities (UCEDD) and will be implemented in cooperation with Texas Cooperative Extension.
“We are excited about future opportunities to collaborate with people with disabilities and their families, and with state, university and system partners to address issues of importance to citizens with disabilities,” said Mike Benz, center director and department head in educational psychology. "Through the center, we will be able to conduct research and provide interdisciplinary training, community services and outreach efforts."
This outreach includes Camp LIFE (Leadership, Independence and Friends through Experiences), founded in 2004 to provide fully accessible recreational camping experiences for special needs children and their siblings. Camp LIFE is held twice a year at the facilities of Camp For All in Burton.
Preservice special education teachers in the College of Education and Human Development serve as camp counselors.
“I definitely think that being [a counselor] at Camp LIFE is the best preparation for being a teacher. You have more respect for the parents and even the kids and what they go through after these three days,” said three-time Camp LIFE counselor and special education major Ally Vogler, '07.
The center seeks to narrow the gap between people with disabilities such as mental retardation, dyslexia and autism, and those without.
The center also offers several education and training efforts, including graduate degrees in special education and low incidence disabilities training; web-based training courses for Texas A&M faculty, in-service teachers, administrators and extension agents; and a CDD Fellows Program for doctoral students.
Project WORLD—Words of Oral Reading and Language Development—is in its second year of increasing emergent literacy and language development in preschoolers by identifying the types of texts and instruction needed to bring at-risk preschoolers up to the performance levels of those children who excel academically.
“This project is very exciting in that we are working with the teachers to understand the world concepts preschoolers should understand,” said Deb Simmons, co-principal investigator and professor of special and bilingual education. “By incorporating informational text and opportunities to interact with words during shared book reading experiences, we hope to broaden children’s knowledge of the world and increase their literacy abilities.”
As the center works toward accomplishing its mission, it will give new meaning to equality and equal opportunity, not only in Texas but across the nation. 