Benhaven's History

Benhaven was founded in 1967 by Amy Lettick, a teacher and mother of an autistic child. Originally a day school, Benhaven was conceived to serve children whose handicaps were preventing them from receiving an appropriate education in existing public and private schools. As community needs emerged over the next ten years, Benhaven also evolved to provide the services that they needed. Residential services, vocational training, and adult day programs were added over this period. In the course of working intensively with a small group of individuals, Benhaven developed a unique and specific expertise in working with autism. Benhaven also developed a heightened awareness for some of the issues that were impacting services for this population in the community at large. We started to look at new models of service delivery that would allow us to apply our expertise more broadly and reach more individuals by collaborating with existing institutions and bringing our services where people live and go to school. In order to expand our ability to serve individuals with autism beyond the somewhat limited confines of our school and group homes, Benhaven developed programs for Shared Living, Respite, and Benhaven's Learning Network. (Click on the link to any of these programs to find out more about them.) All of these programs focus on the provision of services "in place," and serve to strengthen, rather than replace, existing schools and families.

Given the growing incidence of autism in recent years, and the concurrent strain on public funds for special education and residential services, we strongly believe that developing collaborative models is critical to meeting the future needs of people with autism. Although we have learned most assuredly that separate, specialized school and residential programs for people with autism are a critical piece of any rational service continuum, exclusive reliance on these programs is not financially practical, and does not provide the best opportunities for many to develop to their full potential.

Benhaven, then, has in some ways come full circle over the last 35 years. Started as a reaction to a lack of appropriate services for autistic children in existing school systems, expanded as a reaction to a lack of autism-specific residential and vocational programs, refocused in reaction to a lack of community resources for families trying to cope with autistic members at home, we are now directed in large part to the development of service models that improve the capacity of existing community resources. This should enable more and more individuals with the problems associated with autism to live, learn and work happily and productively in their own communities.