By Scottie Brown
The Selma Times-Journal

For the last 15 years, Carolyn Bates has worked with different children of Selma, watching them grow and develop into the students and people she feels they have the potential to become.

Bates founded the Selma Disabilities Advocacy Program 15 years ago. It’s a completely donation funded program. Bates said she enjoys seeing the significant changes in her students after a summer.

“Some of our children with autism come in and they’re making a lot of movement and different things,” Bates said. “Once they leave the program, their movement has stopped or there is a significant decrease. When they come in, some of them are not verbal, and when they leave out they’re totally verbal.”

The namesake program, BATES, closely works with the volunteers for the Supported Employment Technical Training program, or SETT, Bates said.

“They work together,” Bates said. “By them working together, the students in the BATES program get an opportunity to work with children that are on a higher [educational] level, and they can imitate those. And by imitating students on a higher [educational] level they become very efficient on their levels.”

The BATES program, which had 10 students enrolled this summer, allows special needs children to be included with their grade levels at school.

“Every year after we go through the programs where they learn job skills, career planning, social skills, and they also do a set of academics curriculum through the entire summer,” Bates said. “Once they complete this set of activities, they should be on their grade level or above for the next school year when they go back to school.”

Pat Stewart, director of the program for the summer, said some of the techniques the program used included going to the puppet show at the local library.

“The information we have is hands-on and encourages them to talk to us,” Stewart said. “If we give them hands-on activities, visual, they will perform better and speak to us better.”

Stewart also said parents have noticed differences in their children after they have participated in the program.

“One parent did indicate they had seen tremendous improvement in their child,” Stewart said. “He’s begun to talk more and he indicates to his parents he is ready to go to school.”

The goal of the program is to do just that, Bates said.

Bates said the program would not force students to learn something or student to participate in something they did not want to.

“That’s the main focus of the program,” Bates said. “We don’t want the children to be forced to learn, we want them to let us know that they want to learn and they want to come to a place that is pleasing and pleasant to learn.”

At the end of the summer, students were rewarded with a pizza party, but Stewart said her reward was not a pizza party, but being able to see a child grow through the program.

“We’re elated,” Stewart said. “It’s indescribable. We can’t tell you how happy it makes us feel because when we can encourage a child to be here or to come to school or come to an activity. They’re looking forward to a positive life. Overall, it makes them better people.”