Intensive Program

Dedicated Education Team
The Guild School’s Intensive Program offers a dedicated education manager and three special educators who deliver instruction within the school building and in residences to teach skills specific to the individual’s needs, with particular emphasis on skills of daily living.

Medical Access
Many students referred to The Guild School’s Intensive Program experience severe medical needs, such as diabetes, feeding tubes, cecostomy tubes, life-threatening allergies, low oxygen levels, exacerbated seizure disorders, spinal fusions, and rare genetic syndromes that require specialized medical care. The Guild School’s Intensive Program offers 24/7 medical hotline access and dedicated RN and LPN providers within the program and CNAs available in each house.  Consulting physicians and visual services’ providers are also part of the program.

Healthy Eating
Some Guild students present with feeding challenges and require the assistance of another person to eat safely and effectively. The Guild School’s Intensive Program works with students to develop individual eating plans to make mealtime a safe and pleasant experience. The Guild employs a team of nurses and speech pathologists as well as an occupational therapist and dietician to enhance muscle control and sensory processing needed to sit up, manage food in the mouth, swallow the food, and move the food through the digestive tract. Additionally, The Guild’s team, including multiple levels of nursing, works with staff to support students who cannot ingest food orally or who need complex oral feeding regimes to ingest food safely without choking or aspirating.

Mobility
Many of The Guild School’s Intensive Program students have difficulty with ambulation, gait, balance, coordination, and proprioception due to seizure disorders, dyspraxia, stroke histories, and genetic disorders.  Several students require assistive devices for mobility, including wheelchairs, walkers, and gait belts. The Guild School’s Intensive Program provides a dedicated physical therapist and occupational therapist to support those specialized needs.

Communication
The Guild School’s Intensive Program  utilizes a total communications approach to enhance each student’s communications skills, incorporating manual sign, assistive technology devices, and augmentative and alternative communications skills training to supplement a student’s verbal speech or supplant when speech is not possible or not intelligible. The goal of The Guild’s use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is to empower individuals to access to the most effective and interactive communication possible. Speech services are provided by certified Speech and Language Pathologists who have caseloads of only nine students to maximize opportunities for students to generalize communication in community settings with the support of highly-qualified service providers.

Behavior
The Guild School’s Intensive Program offers behavior clinicians and a dedicated clinical case manager who work in concert with families, residential care providers, speech therapists, teachers, occupational therapists, mental health providers, and medical personnel to develop multi-modal behavioral supports for students with complex profiles who do not respond to traditional methods of behavior modification.

School and Residential Staffing
The Guild School’s Intensive Program students need constant staff supervision in group homes, classrooms, and in the community. The Guild School’s Intensive Program is staffed at a nearly 1:1 waking ratio and 1:2 sleeping ratio with constant clinical support in the classrooms and group homes. There are only six students per home with a dedicated residential program director for the three intensive group homes to maximize the individualized attention for each student. Staff to student educational ratio is 1:2, not including specialty providers, therapists, and clinicians.