Stories of Bridgeway House: Jessica Benetreu

Presenter: June 18 is Autistic Pride Day. We’re celebrating by visiting Bridgeway House, the local school that serves our autism community. Here’s teacher Jessica Benetreu:

Jessica Benetreu: It really is amazing. There’s no place like Bridgeway. No day is ever the same. You never know what’s going to happen.

I have eight students and four staff besides myself in the room. It’s a really, really good ratio. My previous school, I had the same amount of staff and 50 students on my caseload. So it’s definitely a really good ratio.

[00:00:40] My students too, they’re the older group. My classroom is typically 13 to 21. And so when I’m looking at a student, it’s usually face to face. Or they’re looking down on me. Yeah, so I have some pretty large students. We do get hit. Luckily I haven’t been bit, but definitely a few good punches in there every once in a while.

[00:01:04] I mean, sometimes in my classroom being sworn at is kind of like a ‘Hello.’ It happens pretty frequently, you know.

[00:01:13] So I got my bachelor’s in elementary education and then my master’s is also in education. And then, there’s a SPED (special education) endorsement, so which just the endorsement by itself was like a few credits shy of a master’s. It’s like a whole program.

[00:01:32] And there’s definitely specialties that you can get in with it. You know, there’s teachers for the deaf, there’s teachers for the blind, the autism specialist, like there’s all different certificates and stuff you can get on top of that.

[00:01:45] But Bridgeway is different from a regular public school in the way that in a typical school, there’s just not a lot of ways to bounce ideas off of each other or to troubleshoot or to figure out how things are going to flow. There’s no other teachers in a regular public school that really deal with the same things that you’re dealing with. You’re specialized for a reason.

[00:02:10] Where when you go to Bridgeway, I can ask the teacher next door, I can ask the principal, we have a behavior specialist I can refer to. There’s lots of extra help. Anyone I talk to in the hall is going to know how that react to a situation, to a crisis. They know how to handle it.

[00:02:28] Where in the public school, you’re running around like crazy and nobody knows how to help you. You get a few IAs that are also trained, but it’s just not the same. Nobody’s trained to the same extent.

[00:02:42] My classroom, in particular, due to our location, I get a lot of the more aggressive students or the ones that try to run because, you know, we’re out in the country, so there’s nowhere really for them to run to. It’s much better than our downtown location for these students because they’re not running around downtown Eugene, you know, on their own and unsafe.

[00:03:05] But my staff, my whole school, like we have policies in place to handle those situations. even though you have the same students. It’s definitely, like I said, no day is ever the same.

[00:03:19] Movies are an experience in my classroom. We have a list of banned movies because it’s an experience you’ll never have with anyone else. They love to act out the movies in every way, shape and form. Aladdin is not allowed anymore.

[00:03:38] I had a student and granted, they’re adult size, and so one was trying to act out a certain part in the movie, and he walked up and just tried to plant a kiss on one of my IAs, and she was able to like stick her hand up, and he ended up just kissing her hand, but like, you’re constantly on your seat, waiting to see what’s going to happen next.

[00:04:02] You know, I’ve got eight students in there, and not one of them is probably sitting in the chair like you would normally assume during a movie time. I mean, there’s popcorn going everywhere, but it’s also, those are the social skills that we’re working, because they’re not able to go to a movie theater and watch the movie the same way they do at home.

[00:04:24] And so we’re practicing. They don’t get to pick the movies. It’s always a Disney classic, something that they’ll enjoy. But we make sure we pick the movies so that they get the experience of, ‘It’s not always my choice.’ Somebody else got to choose it and they have to work through that.

[00:04:45] And then, you know, the expectation is you’re going to be in the room. You’re going to watch it. You don’t have to love it. If you don’t want to watch it, they can play with fidgets or do their own thing, but they need to be in the room. And tolerate it.

[00:05:01] The hardest part about working at Bridgeway is that it’s really dependent on you creating bonds with your students and really knowing them, knowing how to recognize when they’re starting to escalate, how to pivot if something is not going well, but still keeping the same schedule because they so strive for structure that you can’t just completely change it, but knowing how to make little pivots so that you’re not causing explosive kids in the classroom.

[00:05:36] Another thing about Bridgeway that’s different is that we really strive to work with the whole family. Usually, by the time they get to our school, the kids are pretty defeated. The parents are pretty defeated.

It’s not like we’re the easiest school to get into. There’s an avenue that you have to take. We’re looked at by the school district as more of a restrictive environment because we are so specialized that they try to exhaust all the other options.

[00:06:08] And so, by the time the families do make it to us, they’ve kind of given up. And you can see that and I think the thing that makes Bridgeway really great is that we really try to make the classrooms structured around the students. My high school students, I’m not transitioning them through seven different teachers for math, reading, writing.

[00:06:32] They’re not having to figure out all these different rules, all these different expectations from all these different teachers. They’re just dealing with me and my staff. They get to really know us. It works out really, really well. The parents appreciate us. In my classroom alone, three of us are actually parents of children with autism, myself included.

[00:07:01] I have an 11-year-old and so I’m able to relate to my parents and they feel like they’re not being judged. I have to say, a lot of people tell us that we’re amazing people because we have all this patience for dealing with these children, where in reality, it’s a lot easier to be a teacher and to deal with a kid yelling in your face than it is to be a parent dealing with a child that’s yelling in your face.

[00:07:30] I can wipe it off and go home and I live my life at home and it’s no big deal when I’m a teacher, but when it’s my son coming at me in my face and I’m trying to figure out how to make them a better person and how we’re going to do this as a life, it’s different. It really makes things different.

[00:07:51] So I can ask my other staff member, ‘Well, what does this look like in high school? Like, what is my life going to really look like?’

[00:07:57] And then another one, her son is in his 30s, and I’m like, ‘Okay, so what does life after school look like? What is that transition?’

[00:08:05] Because a lot of our students, you know, we’re hoping that they’re going to go get jobs in the community. That’s our goals for them. We want them to be out and about going to movie theaters, going bowling, just having fun and enjoying life,

[00:08:20] I’m trained and I’m supposed to know what that looks like, but there’s not really any way to know unless you’ve lived it, and to know what steps to take and what it’s going to really look like.

[00:08:31] Presenter: We’ve been visiting with Jessica Benetreu, celebrating and recognizing an irreplaceable resource for the Eugene Springfield Lane County autism community, Bridgeway House. You can learn more and donate at the website, BridgewayHouse.org. Or call (541) 345-0805.

During summer break, calls to Bridgeway House will be automatically transferred to school admin team cell phones. For faster service, call the cell phones directly: (541) 743-5159 and (505) 930-6910.