Overcoming
the Autism Gap
Meeting Needs in
the Mountain State
KRISTEN UPPERCUE
By the time Lily Snyder was a year and a half old, her parents,
Michael and Stacy Snyder, had noticed signs that she wasn’t
pointing, waving or talking like other children her age. Their
physician referred them to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
Medical Center for an in-depth evaluation, where she was
diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
A Lack of Services
Once Lily was diagnosed with autism, there was a clear gap
that hindered Michael and Stacy from finding adequate care
and therapy and learning how to take care of a child with
autism. During the testing process to see where Lily placed
developmentally, they would wait weeks for appointments.
They quickly realized that faster, more accessible and more
affordable care was available outside of West Virginia and
considered moving to Ohio.
One in 59 children in the U.S. have been identified with
autism spectrum disorder, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Autism and Developmental
Disabilities Monitoring Network. An individual with autism
has a variety of emotional, physical and social needs depend-
ing on the degree of their disorder. In West Virginia, it’s harder
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WEST VIRGINIA EXECUTIVE
for families to find support for those needs because of a lack
of trained professionals and facilities, leaving many to do what
the Snyders did: travel outside the state to find more adequate
and faster services.
“I can attest that there are too few providers in West Virginia,
especially in rural areas,” says Susannah Poe, director of ap-
plied behavior analysis (ABA) services at the WVU Medicine
Children’s Hospital’s Neurodevelopmental Center and pro-
fessor of pediatrics at the West Virginia University (WVU)
School of Medicine. “There are also too few training programs
for those wanting to go into the field and not enough state-
wide support to help develop and grow meaningful support
for families.”
Meeting the Need
However, there are many organizations in the state attempting
to fill in those gaps. The West Virginia Autism Training Center
(WVATC), housed at Marshall University, attempts to meet
the needs of individuals with autism, as well as the needs of
their support systems. The center has three programs designed
to help individuals with autism pursue a life of quality, the
first of which works to effectively transition young adults