Soaring Eagle Academy offers a new look at children with Autism and related disorders as individuals with great potential for interacting, communicating and thinking. As the only school to integrate Developmental Language Models and DIR®/Floortime principles, for students ages 5-22 years old, within a nurturing social and academic environment that embraces the “whole child” supporting their individual differences and learning styles, while wooing each child into engaging interaction and meaningful learning, we believe that when students comprehend and their intentions and actions are truly understood, amazing development unfolds and students soar to higher levels of learning! The importance of understanding and supporting a child's language comprehension and communication during a stress response and developing a school culture that promotes and sustains this developmental thinking is unique to SEA. A student’s challenges are caused by their 1) sensory or affect/emotional experience within an environment, 2) lack of understanding due to language comprehension deficits, 3) internal experience, 4) motor challenges, 5) communication attempt, 6) previous history/trauma and 7) difficulty keeping affect/emotion in their body. Considering a child’s communication and comprehension is often the missing piece during a stress response. SEA staff support the child’s language system while also maintaining self-awareness for keeping their own calm internal and external state, being aware of their own breathing, heart rate, synchronous movement and rhythm, paced timing, just right vocal intensity and speed with talking at a minimum, attuning and watching the child’s actions- all while sending the nonverbal message that they care and are present, that they believe in the child and believe that the child can get calm which makes their nervous system feel safe. SEA believes it is critical to work together within the community to change the mindset – that student behaviors are not for the purpose of control, gaining attention, escaping non-preferred tasks, delaying/escaping assigned tasks, wanting things a particular way, wanting access to preferred activities/items or getting preferred activities, people and items- but rather as communication in a time of stress. Let’s work together to understand, honor and support what the child is telling us.