The Place for Children With Autism - Portage Park

Unfortunately, our services are not yet covered by Illinois Medicaid. We work with families willing to purchase private insurance plans then help them with covering the cost of those plans (premiums and out of pocket expenses) by leveraging available resources. More than 60% of our current families have Medicaid and have chosen to take advantage of these resources to gain access to the necessary treatment for their kids.

Our program and schedules were structured around full-time enrollments with the exception of our Bloomington location which offers half day and full day programming. Due to capacity and staffing implications, we only offer full time enrollment at majority of our centers.

All behavior technicians are required to undergo an initial training which encompasses in person training and structured overlapping and observation. Furthermore, all behavior technicians must complete the 40-hour coursework, in-person competency assessment and computer-based exam required to obtain their Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) certification within the first 6 months of employment. There is a range of experience and education level across all staff, many of them having bachelors and masters level credentials and others pursuing their postgraduate coursework in ABA principles as well. All children have a one to one therapist throughout the day, and all children are additionally supervised by a masters level BCBA in addition to their established support staff (ie – Case Managers and BCBA students). We firmly believe that a person’s education level by itself is not an indicator for whether they will work well with children, specifically children with autism. We take great care in finding clinicians who are passionate, driven, empathetic and patient first and foremost, then we rely on our training and development program to further their skill set.

The Place for Children with Autism works with The Place for Speech to offer convenient speech therapies on-site at our various locations. Speech therapies are provided by a Speech Language Pathologist during the day when a child is already at the center. If interested in learning more about these therapies, visit theplaceforspeech.com.

We work with children ages 2-6 years of age. We would like to eventually address additional phases of the lifeline, but felt it was important to establish the basis from which all additional services would be developed from. This age range has the highest impact on a child’s development, and our goal is to ensure these children are provided with pre-requisite skills to build the rest of their academic experiences from. As our program develops, we will also look to provide services to older children after school and on the weekends, then will also look to develop vocational programs beginning at the transitional age and into adulthood.

All centers are open Monday through Friday from 8:00am-4:30pm

We generally try to keep our centers small, each BCBA supervises 7-8 children on their caseload and centers that have multiple BCBAs have from 21-24 kids in total. We felt it was important to keep the environments small and intimate so there is more focus on the child as an individual rather than maintaining and operating large centers.

We begin the transition process at least six months before your child’s anticipated departure date. The BCBA works closely with the family to ensure the child is well prepared for the transition to school. This will include changes in programming as well as a focus on transition during parent training meetings. The BCBA will prepare reports that can be shared with the child’s educational team and attend school observations and meetings to ensure a smooth transition into their educational placement.