Today, we talk about the Star Town in Jinzhai, Anhui. The two pictures at the beginning of the article are very valuable for comparison: the first one is the land under the feet of the children is the earliest planned land for Xingxing Town. The picture below is a picture after the building structure of Xingxing Town was topped off by the end of 2021. From nothing to something, it took a group of people nearly 3 years.
In the past two years, ALSOLIFE has been paying attention to the progress of the town: In 2018, when we first introduced the town to you, several founding parents had just taken down the construction land of the town, set development concepts and operation methods, and planned a blueprint for the future; in 2020, the town broke ground and the seeds were germinated; by the end of 2021, the town completed the structure capping, and the buildings where the children lived were raised. The renovation is underway and is expected to be put into use in March and April next year.
Whether we can afford it or not, this utopian idea originated from Japan's "Beech Town" has changed from a design on paper to 9 high-rise buildings in just four or five years. It is a feat. What kind of parents have to do with what kind of determination to do this?
The architecture is solidified, and what makes the architecture "live" is the children of the stars coming one after another. In recent years, the town has issued three shareholder recruitment notices, and 69 shareholder parents have joined the town under the common concept to build the town. There are more and more children coming here to live. From the earliest two or three to now, there are 18 children living in Xingxing Home, a small town, from their teenage years old to nearly 30 years old, and there are also girls.
After the house was built, the outside world's curiosity about the town changed from "Can it be built" to "So much money, what services can children enjoy in the town?" Today we will focus on the services of the town and introduce to you the life of autistic children here, the ratio of students and teachers, the professional level of teachers, and how to support children?
There is a parent apartment in the town, and you can support your child with your child
There are parents who are confused. After sending their child to Xingxing Town, can I go to see him? How often should I watch it? Can you take him home? Parents who have such doubts may not have a clear positioning of the town. Xingxing Town is the permanent home for children and parents, not an institution sent to nurturing. If you want to leave, it depends entirely on the mood and needs of parents and children, and there are no so many constraints and concerns.
Star town exists in the form of unit families, and many unit families gather together to become small towns. When the children come here, they first establish a good relationship with the teachers and partners who accompany him, and then leave the unit family and adapt to collective life.
Currently, there are 18 children living in Xingxing Home for a long time. Xingxing Home is not far from Xingxing Town, and is renovated from an idle Hope Primary School. Its function is very clear. It is the training center and transformation center for children to move into the town from all over the world. After they adapt to collective life here, they finally enter Xingxing Town. Here, they can grow vegetables, exercise, draw, and do handicrafts, focusing on cultivating adaptability and self-care abilities, making their lives more regular, their emotions more stable, their behaviors more appropriate, and their living habits better and better. Home also has another role to cultivate a team of backbone teachers and reserve talents for the operation of the town.
Holidays are the time when the children in their homes have the least children. During this National Day holiday, except for one child who stayed in the kindergarten and did not go home, the parents of the two children went to Jinzhai to accompany them, all the others were picked up. After a while, parents can generally find that their children have made progress to varying degrees and are better raised and taken care of. This is what the town’s initiating team and service team want to see the most.
" The future star town not only has a family unit for children, but also a parent apartment, just to facilitate parents to accompany each other with their children during their lifetime. " Xiaoman's mother said that she is one of the initiators of the town and a permanent member of Jinzhai on the town board of directors. She has a 27-year-old son with moderate to severe autism.
Xiaoman is the first child of Xingxing Home and has long been adapting to life here.He participates in various activities every day according to the schedule of the home group. On weekends, Xiaoman's mother will take him back to her residence to live a family life. It is a very important activity to accompany his son to write calligraphy. Xiaoman started learning in 2009. At first it was for rehabilitation training, but later he liked it and kept writing for 13 years. She would take Xiaoman to copy ancient poems, but she was not sure whether her son really understood the meaning of the poem. Compared with more than 20 years ago, Xiaoman is now making a great progress in being able to do what she likes quietly, and she is very content.
"This model is something that families who are willing to accompany their children in Jinzhai in the future can do. is usually in a small town and goes home on weekends. " Xiaoman's mother added.
Currently, 18 children are equipped with 16 front-line teachers,
Lack of professional teachers and front-line service personnel, which is a common problem for all service institutions for older mentally disabled people. The town is no exception, especially life care teachers. They are the people who accompany their children the most, and they also bear the important responsibility of guiding children's emotions and dealing with children's behavior problems.
To solve this problem, the "home plan" came into being. Every member who comes to the town has to undergo one-to-one personalized training, which took more than a month. This process is called the "home plan". From 2019 to the present, through the "Home Plan", children have learned basic life skills such as helping the kitchen, wiping the table, making desserts, and folding clothes, which has reduced the difficulty of taking care of them. A group of life teachers grew up. They are over 35 years old and have experience in raising children. On the basis of fully understanding and accepting people with autism, they also master certain intervention knowledge.
"We currently have 18 children in the kindergarten, and there are 16 first-line teachers, which is a very high configuration in older institutions." Xiaoman's mother introduced.
Guo Ningwei once served as an external behavior instructor in Xingxing Town, helping to train teachers and guiding children's daily emotional and behavior correction. During the three years of cooperation, Mr. Guo has given the parents of the town great confidence in emotional and behavioral interventions in adult children with autism. "Some children who feel helpless are changing quietly, which has triggered our thinking about how to help children create a long-term and sustainable life, and at the same time strengthens our determination to take the path of professionalism." Xiaoman's mother emphasized.
It is understood that Currently, the front-line staff in Xingxing Town, from teachers to administrative and logistics teams, are mostly locals in Jinzhai, including "post-70s", "post-80s" and "post-90s". They have a relatively large age span, and their educational level and life experience are also different.
Life teacher Sun Jun has worked at Xingxing Home for almost three years. Before joining the town, he was engaged in the individual catering industry in Hangzhou. Because he accompanied his children in the college entrance examination, he returned to Jinzhai to settle down. Later, when the child went to college, he began to turn his attention to himself. "I had a dream of being a teacher when I was in school. By chance, I became a life teacher in a small town," said Sun Jun.
Previously, Sun Jun had no intersection with the genealogy circle, so it was not easy to win the trust of such a group of children. "Love, patience and care are essential, but the most important thing is equality and respect. You cannot treat them as disabled people condescendingly, but as close friends, family, and children of your own." He said, "Secondly, you also need keen insight and clear thinking. Autistic people themselves have communication barriers , and it is even more difficult to communicate with children without language. How to understand their needs, help them express their requirements correctly, and build a bridge of communication between teachers and children. This is very important and wonderful!"
In order to support students more professionally, all teachers in the town participated in the theoretical and practical learning of application behavior analysis . Everyone understands that communication disorders are the root cause of many problem behaviors. Each child’s situation is different. He needs to observe keenly before developing a rehabilitation plan. These plans must be implemented accurately until the month, week, or even the day without any discount.
The following is the experience of getting along with autistic child Xiao A shared by Teacher Sun Jun:
Xiao A is a person with severe autism. He has no language. When he comes to Xingxing Home, his back is bent and arched, he can't stop him and lie in a dirty ditch on the side of the road to drink water. All needs are expressed by violently hitting his head against the ground or hard objects. He is afraid of people, his muscles are tight, and he cannot perform normal activities with his companions.
First of all, observe, know when he wants to drink water, eat, urinate, etc. through observation, remember the time points, and the behavioral characteristics and expressions of each demand. It will be predicted when it appears again next time.
For example, when he wants to urinate, he likes to touch his genitals; if he wants to drink water, he usually swallows his mouth when he wakes up in the morning or afternoon break; he has no language, how can the teacher know when the stool is relieved? I came up with a solution: every time he defecates, put a stool in front of him, put 5 neatly arranged paper on the stool, guide him to wipe it with the paper in turn after he is defecated, and finally the teacher will repair it. Since then, no problematic behavior has been caused by defecation.
Second, accompany you for a long time and equally, get your heart close, let him trust and rely on you, be wary of you, relax your muscles, calm your heart, and become fat. through hanging bar , physical stretching, back straightened, waist straightened. In daily activities, act alone first, then make progress a little bit, and then integrate into the collective after adapting smoothly. At present, he can run and walk with his classmates, eat out quickly and slowly, stop or stop, etc., and is fully integrated. Simple command controls and requirements are being learned. Communication is smooth, and you are required to get a correct response in time. You don’t have to bump your head anymore. You are quiet and cheerful. You fall asleep with a smile every night.
Over the past three years, I am so moved that I have watched the children grow and improve little by little. A life teacher with rich experience and solid theoretical knowledge is indispensable for the future development of the town, and I am working hard to get closer in this direction. I believe that wherever time and energy are used, it will bloom.
Starting from 2022, the town will launch an expert team service method
Among the current 18 children in Jinzhai, some of them have good hands-on skills, can do particularly meticulous work, and are patient enough, but they are emotionally unstable, often lose their temper and destroy things; some children are not literate without language, but they can also express their needs and are emotionally stable... Because each child's abilities are unbalanced, they need to be case-centered and individualized support.
"Each case has complete document information, family-filled information (interview records and videos), collective life information (life records), course learning (curriculum records), and regular evaluation information (evaluation forms). From the comparison of these information, it can be clearly seen that the child's situation is getting better and better." Tian Hanfen introduced. She is the head of the Special Group Health Center in Xingxing Town, and her son Li Che is 19 years old and has an autism spectrum. Before Xingxing Town, I had taken my son to live in Beijing. In order to have a place to go, I moved from the city to the suburbs. But because my child was yelling and my neighbor couldn't bear it, he called the police. There was no way for Li Che to take him home, so he asked Tian Hanfen to take him home.
Later, Tian Hanfen inspected many adult custodian institutions, and the current service status generally did not satisfy her. Once she visited an institution and opened the door, she saw that there were no less than 20 steel wire folding beds in the room, and she could only walk sideways between the beds. The institution teacher enthusiastically said that he could put his children here, just take them over during the Spring Festival every year, and it would be fine if he didn't ask about Li Che's situation. The institution’s house is also rented, and I don’t know if it can be supported in the future.
Star Town Rehabilitation Unit Design Diagram
The fear of the child's old age is shrouded in every autistic family. Until the idea of Xingxing Town reached a consensus among some parents: while arranging their children's lives and maintenance, parents also retired in different places in the same community. This "dual care model" is what Tian Hanfen ideally looks like. Now, from the connotation to the extension of the town, it is becoming more and more full and three-dimensional.
Starting from 2022, the town has officially launched the service method of expert teams. The expert team consists of four parts: psychiatrist, behavioral analyst, town management teacher, and nursing teacher. includes formulating individual training plans for children and formulating strategies for handling new discomfort behaviors that arise in children's collective life. The four parts of the forces are in line with each other, helping the "Home Plan" to operate, and front-line nursing teachers operate in detail day after day, helping students better adapt to life here.
The main expert team of the town is composed of Professor Zou Bing and Teacher Liu Linmei.
Professor Zou Bing is the deputy chief physician of Nanjing Brain Hospital . He has been exposed to autism for many years. He not only has rich diagnosis experience, meticulous observation, but also has very rigorous medication. This year, several children with serious problem behaviors in the town were provided with separate expert services by Professor Zou Bing. She carefully checked whether the child's behavior was a mental illness. If it did not, she did not need to take medicine. If you really need to take medication as an auxiliary means, you will also start with the minimum dose and increase it a little bit to avoid drug abuse.
Teacher Liu Linmei is an internationally certified BCBA with rich experience in curriculum formulation and problem behavior strategy formulation. This year, different courses have been offered for each child’s abilities. Moreover, Teacher Liu is good at training. This year, he has trained 4 professional teachers and 3 teachers are learning, which has played a very important role in the development and improvement of the town’s personnel.
In 2022, the "Home Plan" attempts to cooperate with Connorzhou . Connorzhou International Education Center has assigned senior teachers to be responsible for the professional supervision of behavior analysis in Xingxing Town, and regularly go to Jinzhai for on-site guidance every quarter and weekly online supervision.
"" The team of managers and nursing staff in the town has more than 20 people. The recruitment of all personnel is signed according to different requirements of actual position settings. The formal labor contract is signed, and the probation period and assessment are arranged. As the development stage is different, different training will be arranged. " Tian Hanfen revealed. She also emphasized that the town's service content and service model have been carried out in accordance with its original intention since its establishment, and there has been no change. It is just that the form is becoming more and more abundant, the professionalism is becoming more and more in-depth, and the management is becoming more and more perfect. All of this is to create a dignified lifestyle for children that can reflect their value.
Instead of arguing, it is better to implement the steadily
Xingxing Town adopts the model of "parents investing in establishing joint-stock companies, autonomous, and non-civilian enterprises (health care centers) operations". The first batch of parents who entered the company must pay a capital fee of 500,000 yuan and a loan of 500,000 yuan. The second batch of equity fees is 600,000 yuan, of which 100,000 is the premium of , which is considered that the shareholder family bears greater risks in the early stage. All shareholders have the same shares and rights. In addition, each family you join needs to provide a proof of 5 million yuan in family property to ensure that your child can continue to live in the town in the future.
Since we knew that it would take 5 million threshold to move into a town, discussions about the town have always existed. Some people say that Xingxing Town is a club for rich people, and it is enough for ordinary families to see it; some people say that letting a group of children leave their native community and live in a strange place is to raise them in captivity; some people think that the idea of the town is very good, but how to realize the future inheritance? This generation of entrepreneurial parents is gone, will anyone take over...
In different voices, parents in the town rarely respond and are more willing to convey to the outside world through actions: " Star Town was not built in one day, and it still has some time to operate. This is an exploratory project, and any conclusion is too early. We should just practice it steadily, look at the future, believe in the future, and do it, that's right! ”
Xiaoman's mother and Tian Hanfen represent the parents of the town. I want to tell everyone:
We are not a rich club that is misunderstood by society, but just a group of parents who are willing to give all their contributions to our autistic children.The purpose is to create a permanent home for this group of children. They can have a place to go when they grow up; we are gone, and they can live with dignity.
Although the star town has a wall, it does not encircle and raise the children. We keep taking them out, going out shopping, watching movies, outings, having big meals, swimming, taking transportation, and long-distance traveling, so that they can slowly integrate into social life. moves from home to star home and star town, and then from star town to social life. This change is not a day or two, but is calculated based on months and years. This requires a series of practices. Behind it is day after day behavior intervention, which cultivates their good behavior habits and allows them to step out of the door to the outside world.
In order to ensure the durability of Xingxing Town, we are the first autistic nurturing platform in China to own our own land and properties. We will establish a family property trust platform because we firmly believe that the power from parents and relatives is the most solid support.
In order not to forget our original intention and stick to our philosophy, we designed a shareholder iteration recruitment plan. We believe that generations of parents, who share the same illness and empathize with each other, are the best inheritors.
may encounter many difficulties in the future operation. We will move forward with difficulty, join forces to keep warm and support each other. We are particularly willing to see: no matter how old the child is, compared to him personally, he is always improving.
Star Town is not so much a building an institution, but rather an exploration and practice activity, because this model is brand new and not before, so don’t use concepts that we usually have. We are not willing to only bind to certain disputes. We do not talk about our ideas about things we have not done yet. We value implementation. Can we have such an idea: the future Star Town may give you a different new concept and new look, which is beyond everyone’s imagination of the health care of adults with mental disabilities.
