On a Monday afternoon, a group of middle-school boys is bowling at Bel-Mark Lanes. “Way to go, man!” one kid compliments another who’s just knocked down several pins. “Thanks!” the other boy replies with a grin, his hands in his jeans pockets. At first glance, they’re just five kids having fun, but a closer look reveals they’re also hard at work.
Most of the boys have been diagnosed with autism, a developmental disorder which affects boys disproportionately, and whose symptoms include difficulties mastering social skills. This is Ben Darragh’s weekly social skills group, and one of today’s lessons is “offering an encouraging word.” A speech and language therapist at Clague Middle School Darragh, (whose name rhymes with “Sarah”) runs these groups as a private practitioner. He says that it will take “practice, over and over again” before the kids apply the skills on their own.
A trim thirty-six-year-old, brown-eyed and bearded with a gentle demeanor, Darragh says that learning “independence and socialization” tops the skills autistic kids need to be well-functioning adults. He’s trying to teach children struggling with the baffling disorder–as well as those with social language difficulties–how to reach out and respond to others. Darragh “just gets it–he understands the kids,” praises a dad of one of the bowlers.
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When Darragh started the group four years ago, he chose a bowling alley because he needed a place to meet, but he quickly realized how much more engaged the kids became while doing a fun activity. Today, after a round of bowling, the boys move to a meeting room; they munch on Cheetos and sip soft drinks, as Darragh leads a game focusing on “core conversation” skills. During the game, one boy talks about an archery contest he competed in. Another, who was given a card telling him to “make a connection,” says that he was once in a hot-dog-eating contest. “How many hot dogs did you eat?” a boy with an “ask a question” card asks. The answer is, “I ate like fifty! No buns, just the hot dogs.” Yes, he tells the group, it made him really sick. Everyone laughs.
Darragh has to remind one boy to stay on topic during the game. “Do you know how hard it is to listen?!” the boy demands. Darragh admits that it is indeed hard work.
Darragh holds up a plant to demonstrate what makes friendships grow. The boys take turns watering it and share what they’ve done in the past week to “feed a friendship,” including talking to someone at the bus stop and playing an online video game with a friend. Later, Darragh sits in a circle with the boys, and they throw a small squishy ball back and forth. “Where your eyes are, your brain will be,” he says, as they work on eye contact before the throw. He adds more balls, one at a time, and no one drops a ball. “Great job!” he says. “Next time we’ll try for five!”
Darragh’s own experiences help him empathize with the boys. Growing up in Superior Township, he attended St. Paul Lutheran School but struggled with speech difficulties: “I couldn’t say my r’s–butter was ‘buttah.’ It was very Boston sounding.” He laughs now, but he admits back then it wasn’t so funny. “I felt self-conscious and not understood … and that’s not cool in middle school.” Happily, with the help of a skilled speech therapist, he was able to fix his problem before he entered Ypsilanti High. Later, when Darragh was studying education at Eastern, “I remembered my history, and I also knew that I enjoyed working with smaller groups of kids.” He went on for a master’s in speech and language pathology.
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Darragh and his wife, Christine, live on the west side with their three young kids. Both are marathon runners, so “she takes mornings and I take evenings” to train, he says. An interest in meditation led him to become a Buddhist in college. He’s a member of the Zen Buddhist Temple; Christine attends Living Water Lutheran Church in Whitmore Lake with their children. He says sometimes his friends make light of his calm manner–“Oh, Ben’s being Zen again”–but in his work he finds that “learning to be quiet is a helpful skill. My first impulse is to facilitate, but at a certain point, being patient and letting things develop is important–even when it gets awkward.”
Clague school social worker Angela Warr says Darragh “stays calm in any situation–even the most stressful.” In addition to traditional speech and language therapy work, Darragh runs a peer mentoring group with Warr that pairs students in Clague’s two special-ed classrooms with volunteer mentors. Darragh gives the student volunteers some background on autism and says, “You train as you go.” The paired middle schoolers play board games, do art projects, or walk to McDonald’s together.
Many of his bowlers, he says, “don’t have friendships outside of the group, and it can be isolating.” He accepts that change can be very slow; it took three years for one on-and-off bowler to invite a friend to his house.
The group at Bel-Mark ends the day with one more round of bowling. Darragh notices one new kid hanging back and not talking much. Darragh quietly suggests to him that “sometimes a high five is a good way to encourage somebody in the group.” The quieter kid doesn’t take Darragh’s advice but instead offers the other kids a smile. Afterwards, Darragh says, “It’s about the little successes.”