Her work is helping students communicate

Pat Morris of Archbishop Damiano School has been honored for her work in helping non-verbal children communicate.

Morris is an augmentative communication specialist at the Westville Grove school, which serves over 160 students with moderate to severe cognitive disabilities. She has been named Related Service Provider of the Year by the National Association of Private Special Education Centers (NAPSEC).

This is the second year in a row that the national honor has been awarded to an ADS staff member, as Joelle Rossi took home NAPSEC’s Educator of the Year Award in 2016.

Serving at Archbishop Damiano School for more than three decades, Morris has become an expert in the field of augmentative communication.

When she began at the school in the early 1980s, augmentative communication was only in its infancy. However, she saw a need for the augmentative communication early on as many students lacked verbal speech and the fine motor skills needed for American Sign Language.

In the span of 25 years, the program has gone from serving just a single student with one augmentative communication device to more than 50 students and using nine different communication devices.

As an early adopter of eye gaze technology, Morris requested the purchase of the Tobii PCEyeGo retinal scanners only months after their release.

“We are very fortunate to have someone with her vision, ingenuity and creativity on our school staff. She is a motivator to others and her achievements are a credit to herself and our therapeutic department on their focus to provide state of the art services and cutting edge advancements in their field,” ADS principal Kate Flynn said. “Pat is a dedicated, committed individual who is always looking ahead to new and developing trends to assist our students with disabilities.”

Morris has launched a number of successful initiatives over the years, including leading a core vocabulary collaborative learning team, which developed and implemented core vocabulary list, three years prior to the core vocabulary released by Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) and adopted by New Jersey. She has also created interactive books, which she and the Speech Language Pathology team can use to help students with vocabulary and navigating their augmentative communication devices.

Archbishop Damiano School is supported by the House of Charity.