(This story has been updated to correct an inaccuracy.)
SOUTHBOROUGH — New England Center for Children (NECC), a nonprofit provider of special education for children with autism, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Jessica Sassi, the center's president and CEO, told the Daily News in a recent interview that NECC, at 33 Turnpike Road (Route 9), operates "like a teaching hospital."
"We're committed to research and we help those folks launch their careers," she said. "We are serving all of these young people and really educating them and offering them the independence they need to improve their quality of life, and sort of live their best life."
The center offers day school and residential programs in which students are housed in various group homes throughout MetroWest and then are driven on campus for learning.
NECC also offers its autism curriculum encyclopedia (ACE), a type of software used by autism educators.
"We have the chance to really change the lives of so many more people and so I think it's through the technology, I think it's through our incredibly robust programming, I think it's through things like cutting-edge research that's going to allow NECC to continue to really shape the future and improve the future and quality of life of individuals with autism," Sassi said.
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Besides its Southborough campus, NECC operates a consulting program for school districts as well as locations in Abu Dhabi and Dubai (both in the United Arab Emirates) and Qatar.
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The center started out in 1975 as the Efficacy Research Institute on the grounds of Taunton State Hospital. The Efficacy Research Institute was founded by Dudley Orr, John Pangburn and Vincent Strully, who retired as CEO just two years ago.
Strully told the Daily News said that changes include how children with autism are taught.
"There's well developed programs and research in terms of ways to teach individuals with autism," he said. "Clearly, we can make vast differences with a significant percentage of students if we begin working with them as young as 12 months, 16 months, 18 months."
Strully, now an executive adviser to NECC, said that while the future is unclear, the center could look at projects in other places.
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"Well, the future is a little hard to predict in this day and age, but we've established some successful clinics in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Qatar," he said. "I see us picking projects in other parts of the world, if necessary, but mostly I think we want to continue to pursue the ACE software and maybe change its name to the 'autism curriculum environment' instead of 'encyclopedia.'"
Strully also said NECC wants to reach one million children with autism.
"Maybe 30 to 40 years from now, the center would, if autism were actually cured — which I find unlikely — we would pivot to working with kids with different kinds of problems but the material isn'tt that different," he said, adding that he sees more partner classrooms and using NECC software.
He concluded: "If you'd seen us at year one or first month or two, then you saw where we are today at the center ...you would say that it would have been impossible. But as I always say, 'It only took 50 years.'"