LaunchPad: Getting Ready for Adult Years

LaunchPad is a program for teens and young adults on the autism spectrum, as well as their families. LaunchPad evaluations aim to help youth develop strategies for the transition to adulthood. This includes individualized recommendations and help identifying vocational training, apprenticeships, higher education programs, and support services.

LaunchPad is very individualized, serving a range of youth from the neurodivergent college student to those who are highly impacted by autism and significant intellectual disability.

Middle Schoolers and Teens

LaunchPad is a one-of-a-kind program.
LaunchPad is for parents ready to begin to understand what development during the first ten years of special education will mean for capacities likely to develop in the next 10 years of your child’s life.

We know starting to plan for the long-term future is scary, but as one father told us “Tell me whether I need to save for a Special Needs Trust or for College”.

The aims of LaunchPad are to help you envision likely day-to-day capacity for social, vocational, and financial independence for your child. When he or she reaches adulthood.

This usually involves talking to you, talking to your child, and carrying out testing that helps us look into future talents as well as handicaps

High School Grads and Young Adults

Another parent asked how to help his son after “the day the short yellow school bus stopped coming to their house”. Resources, training, and federal guarantees to anything ‘free and appropriate’ largely end when public schooling does.

How do parents support their young adult in advocating for needed resources:

What kind of job training will be a fit? Community college? Independent living possibilities?

We help parents envision likely and successful paths to as much independence as possible.

Our motto: ‘Start low, go slow, but go as far as you can go.’

More About LaunchPad

Each LaunchPad evaluation is quite different, but each one is aimed at helping the youth and their families/support providers understand transition to adulthood. This includes assessing for well-matched vocational training and apprenticeships, as well as higher education where prerequisites in low interest coursework will not result in early drop-out. LaunchPad is based on the idea of ‘starting low, going slow, but going as far as you can go,’—which might mean, living at home, and exploring local supported job opportunities before more tackling more socially challenging activities like starting college courses, or living in a dorm or with house mates.

We see even the smartest, most cognitively-high scoring autistic youth as vulnerable, so we eschew just ‘go out there and let’s see if it can work,’ Data tell us many autistic youth accrue depression and anxiety after early post-high school failures at college level coursework, or at jobs they are smart enough but not social enough to master, or at living outside the cocoon of their family home. For youth with autism and other learning or developmental disabilities, we brainstorm a ‘fit’ for strengths as well as help parents envision what long-term supports are likely to be needed.

For teens and young adults with an intellectual disability as well as an ASD, we help parents think about and plan a conservatorship or Special Needs Trust to create security and safety around future ‘forks in the road’ their child may face. We deal with the practical and psychological factors involved in making future plans for your child, and support referrals and collaborate with legal specialists.

Is LaunchPad for your family?

By the teen years, parents/caregivers start to wonder what adulthood may hold for their child with autism. IEPs will have focused on remediating weaknesses, but at ACNC we believe high school, and even middle school is the time to shift the focus to identifying what the individual can do best to inform the IEP. Some with autism may be rightfully college-bound, some not, or ‘not right away.’ Some may benefit from gap years between high school to further identify and develop vocational aptitudes or to consolidate independent living success. In a LaunchPad assessment we can use targeted cognitive, achievement, and aptitude testing to discuss interests and identify potential areas of successes.

At ACNC, consultation with the youth, separately with their 2 parents/caregivers, and with the family together are all key components of a LaunchPad work-up. Our key principle for transition to adult living involves to ‘start low, go slow, but go as far as you can go.’ The goal is to guide transitional age youth to achieve early success rather than ‘let’s just try this’—and then having to cope with the fallout of early failure—understood to be foundational to the lack of independent living for many autistic young adults.