When it comes to serving students with disabilities, Escambia County has a resource most communities would envy, and now it’s getting even stronger.
The University of West Florida Center for Behavior Analysis has launched an internship partnership with Escambia Westgate School, pairing graduate students training to become Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBA) with the most specialized educational environments in the region. The result is a win for students, a win for future clinicians, and another example of UWF putting its academic resources to work for the community.
Lacey A. Collier Snoezelen Complex
Westgate serves pre-K through high school students up to age 22 with varying exceptionalities — and it’s home to something truly remarkable. The Lacey A. Collier Snoezelen Complex, opened in 2005, is an 11,000-square-foot multi-sensory therapeutic facility and one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
- Walk through the complex, and you’ll find a polar room, a space room, a jungle room and a magic room — immersive environments built around the Dutch therapeutic concept of self-guided exploration. The goal is to help students regulate, engage and learn on their own terms.
It’s exactly the kind of environment that applied behavior analysis thrives in.
“The Snoezelen complex was specifically designed to encourage engagement through curiosity as well as relaxation or leisure,” said Dr. Leasha Barry, director of the UWF Center for Behavior Analysis. “This provides an environment rich in potentially reinforcing stimuli, offering a unique opportunity for children and those who support them using behavior analysis in this context.”
Graduate Experience
UWF graduate student Kelsey Jordan is among the first to step into that opportunity. A former teacher, Jordan is logging the supervisory hours required for BCBA certification while working alongside Westgate’s speech and occupational therapists, teachers and aides. Her classroom background gives her a leg up in building the kind of trust that makes these programs work.
- “Kelsey is a former teacher who effectively draws on her experience to build strong relationships with teachers, administrators, aides and therapists at Westgate,” said Michelle Lambert, associate director of the Center for Behavior Analysis.
That collaboration — across disciplines, across institutions, in service of some of Escambia County’s most vulnerable students — is exactly what this partnership is designed to produce. It’s a model worth watching.