Special Needs Assistant (Behavior Tech)At — Riverside Youth Judo Club, Police Activities League

The tasks that behavior technicians are tasked with at the Riverside Youth Judo club are to help our adaptive students meet these main goals: 

1) Behavioral improvement

2) Social improvement

3) Physical Health improvement.

On the behavioral side our adaptive judo students learn to follow group instructions and individual instructions from instructors to improve compliance and then behaviors are worked on when they arise during non-compliance. Compliance with moderate-to-vigorous exercise has a strong connection to being able to engage in work when our students age out of special education at age 22.  When it comes to socialization, adaptive judo affords a good venue and ample communicative partners to engage in exercise requiring cooperation with a partner through verbal and non-verbal communication.  On the physical health end of things, moderate-to-vigorous exercise offer obvious health benefits to both our adaptive and typical students.

Many of our adaptive students have orthopedic disabilities and they are put through balance exercises in addition to safe falling training. Safe falling is taught to all students in judo but is even more beneficial to our adaptive students with orthopedic impairments since they are more likely to injure themselves when falling in the home, school, and community.