If you noticed an abundance of people wearing blue today, it’s for a good cause: Worldwide Autism Awareness Day.
Pegge Erkeneff with the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District said they work to support autism awareness in classrooms year round.
Erkeneff: “What’s interesting is we’ve had a 500% increase in students who are identified on the autism spectrum in the last 10 years and part of that is happening because of increased professional development and education for educators and for people in the classroom who are working with students and then just an increase in understanding and awareness overall that’s happening nationwide and internationally.”
Teachers and staff are educated in order to provide support for autistic children and the district works to support the students’ parents as well.
Erkeneff: ”We do different outreach programs, we’ve done a series of having speakers come in both on Central Peninsula and on the Sothern Peninsula. We’ve had film series in the past and speakers, we did a disability awareness day with a couple of the schools where we actually had one student with autism speak and then we had lots of different interactive stations for all the students so they could help learn an awareness for the ability in disability and learn compassion for their classmates.”
Many people around the world wore light blue to show support for autism awareness today.
