History and Description of “Northeast Tennessee Autism Society” The group originally started out with Don and Lynne Gouge and Sandy LaGuardia about 3 years ago. They met under the group's name "Northeast TN Autism Society" at Boones Creek Christian Church every first Tuesday evening of the month. They started out meeting this way for about a year when attendance began to dwindle. At this point they began to stop meeting due to lack of support in the area. The group was revised in the Fall of 2003 when Kim Steele and Tracy Gott joined with Lynne Gouge to add new leadership to the group. We kept the name of the group as "Northeast TN Autism Society" and sent out new fliers about regrouping and meeting once again at Boones Creek Christian Church every first Tuesday evening of the month from 6:30 - 8:00 P.M. All of those parents, educators, and therapists involved with children on the autism spectrum and related disorders were invited to attend. Our main goal was to provide information for those just beginning to deal with an autism spectrum disorder and to provide inservices for our local community of parents and teachers in the area dealing with children on the ASD spectrum. We also hoped to get more parents and people involved with our group who could help with our group becoming a tax deductible institute in which we could raise funds for larger projects needed in our area that would benefit our kids. For example, a summer program with materials that would benefit our children when school is not in session. We feel the "Autism Center" at the Nave Center is exactly what we had in mind to benefit our children's needs for language therapy. Our group wants to continue to raise funds that would benefit buying materials for the Nave Center. When we regrouped our leadership in the fall of 2003, Kim Steele was able to provide many excellent speakers and Tracy Gott worked on keeping the mailing list up to date and making fliers to send out each time our group would meet. Lynne Gouge was able to organize and provide a large all day workshop in the spring of 2004 for all parents and educators in the Northeast TN area. This workshop was about the inclusion of a child from the Knoxville, TN area. It was very successful with presenters : Mary Donnet Johnson , author of "Beyond Words...The Successful Inclusion of a Child with Autism" and Sherry Henshaw Corden (Kindergarten Teacher who has been teaching in inclusive kindergarten classes for almost 20 years) and Dr. William Allen, Ph.D., NCSP who added comments and suggestions throughout the all day workshop. We had about 200 participants come to the workshop. Chick Filet donated lunch for all the participants through a member of our group. It was a very successful day! After the workshop our group was able to collect around $1,300.00 profit which we donated to the Nave Center for materials our children would need in the summer School program. After this event, our attendance continued to be very strong. However, when the winter months set in attendance dropped considerably. The group stopped meeting due to lack of attendance in the winter of 2005. We have since regrouped again with Lynne Gouge being in charge of a morning meeting at a new meeting place in Johnson City --"Panera Bread" from 9:00 A.M. -10:00 A.M. the second Tuesday of each month. While Kim Steele and myself have been in charge of the new nightly and special meetings with E.T.S.U. (Health Building) being our new meeting spot. Our next meeting will be our quarterly meeting: Saturday, April 29th from 9:30 - 11:00 A.M. at the Lamb Hall Room 207 @ ETSU. We hope to see new as well as old members appear at our quarterly meeting. We are in desperate need of getting more members to take on more leadership roles so we can obtain our major goals for the area. We want to provide more workshops for parents and educators in the area and have fundraisers so we can provide the help and materials needed for our kids in this area.