Blue Bird Day makes the routine exceptional amid pandemic

Special learners make the transition to virtual classrooms, therapy sessions

Blue Bird Day’s two Chicago centers are closed, including this one in the North Center neighborhood, but the instruction for special learners goes on online. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

CHICAGO — A sense of routine is critical to kids on the autism spectrum and many other special learners.

So what happens to them in the midst of a pandemic that forces everyone to stay home?

“There was a moment in time when we thought we were going to have to close down completely,” said Dr. Laura Mraz, executive director of Blue Bird Day, a Chicago center that serves kids with autism, as well as other sensory processing disorders, in what resembles a kindergarten or preschool setting. “It was very scary.”

Yet, like so many other schools and services, Blue Bird Day made a swift transition to virtual sessions online, even given the increased demands presented by what in many instances is literally hands-on therapy.

“Something we didn’t realize when we were putting all this together is that our kids know how to learn from an iPad,” Mraz said. “They can learn. They’ve had an iPad in their lap since they were born, some of them. So they know how to learn from screens. They can adjust. Maybe their first session or two isn’t as smooth as we would like them, but by the second, third, fourth sessions they’re now in a routine. They understand what is going on. And it’s actually been incredibly therapeutic.”

Blue Bird Day, which has two centers in Chicago’s West Loop and North Center neighborhoods, was uniquely positioned in that it grew out of Mraz’s earlier business, Eyas Landing, which offers more conventional one-on-one sessions for clients ranging from young children to adolescents to even young adults. Mraz said it had been trying to accommodate online sessions “for quite a while,” adding, “I saw that as an opportunity for growth and something that I really wanted to build in our program. But I could never really get our therapists on board,” again because of the accepted need for hands-on contact as part of that therapy.

“When we think about pediatric therapy,” she said, “we need to be touching our clients. But really there’s a whole other model out there available to us, which is parent coaching. And a lot of the evidence in our field shows that parent coaching is incredibly effective in more of the long-term outcomes.

“But it’s tough,” Mraz added, “because it’s hard to coach a parent as a therapist. It’s hard as a parent to be coached by a therapist. It really just takes a certain relationship and a certain dynamic for that to be successful.”

No one is minimizing the difficulty there, but the coronavirus pandemic and the statewide stay-at-home order closing all schools provided the dynamic, in necessity being the mother of invention. “I think what happened with the COVID pandemic is it just forced that,” Mraz said. They went from trying to amass cleaning supplies and other materials to confront the outbreak one week to facing closure for a week, then two weeks, then a month or more.

“We can’t do that from a business perspective, but more importantly our parents can’t do that,” she said. “They need this. This is essential to them. And our kids are going to regress if they go more than a week or two without services.”

Time and retaining a sense of routine and order were critical. “There’s a crucial period in child development that has to be tapped into, and we’re losing that time with these kids,” Mraz added. Blue Bird Bay’s kids range in age from 3 to 7 or 8, and she described the school’s whole approach as “doing this therapy-oriented model in a peer-oriented environment,” serving to “integrate them into what feels like a preschool and kindergarten day for the kids, but they’re actually getting the therapies.

“The thought of going a month, two months, or even longer without them having those resources is really, truly what kept me up at night

.”

Dr. Laura Mraz of Blue Bird Day (Laura Mraz)

“It’s much more of a natural environment,” she added, “but it’s also helping our kids transition from our environment into where we want them to go, which is their local school system.

“The thought of going a month, two months, or even longer without them having those resources is really, truly what kept me up at night,” Mraz said.

The week after the governor imposed that stay-at-home order, however, they were back with 70 percent of their class and session offerings, and as of last week they’d retained 80 percent of their clients.

“It’s gone way better than I really thought it would,” Mraz said. “Our parents are so grateful. I’ve gotten more feedback from parents in the last weeks than I have in the last year. They’re ecstatic.”

Not that it’s been easy. Mraz said that even her own children, 7 and 4, have presented “behavioral challenges” with everyone at home. “Yeah, it’s fun to be home with mom and dad, but mom and dad are working and they’re stressed,” she said. That can be exaggerated for kids with special needs, requiring “the routine that they really thrive on” at the same time that they’re feeling all around them the “overarching emotional stress that they don’t understand.”

They’ve all come through it, though, thanks in large part to the online Zoom platform allowing the kids the interaction onscreen with their classmates and therapists they’d normally have in the classroom. (Blue Bird Day is using a licensed version of Zoom, and as such has averted the hacking problems others using the free online version have experienced.) The kids and their parents have adapted, and Mraz said in some ways it’s the therapists who’ve had to make the hardest transition, mastering a new platform while adapting hands-on teaching methods to a virtual classroom. Mraz added that some have said, “It’s like starting a brand-new job.”

Now, however, “they hands down, all of them, are saying it’s incredibly therapeutic. They’re just loving it.”

Other centers serving kids with special needs might not have fared as well, however. Mraz said she’s fielded calls from a handful of competitors looking for tips on how to make the virtual transition, “which I think is a pretty good sign that it’s pretty tough.” Blue Bird Day, again, benefited from Eyas Landing’s early forays into online session, as well as having three full-time employees dealing with information technology.

But it’s not keeping its findings to itself. Just this week, it launched "Blue Bird Day at Home,” a resource page on its website offering lesson plans, visual supports, and more to all families.

“So, yeah,” Mraz said, in this time of crisis “it’s even more crucial for us to be there to support our families, to support the kids and their routines.”