OASIS Program at Pace U in NYC

<p>We are considering the OASIS Program at Pace for my daughter with Asperger's. Would love to hear any comments positive or negative. She is academically very very bright, but with the challenges of an Aspie (org, social, hygiene, etc). We tried a regular college, using the disability services office, but there was not enough support. This is a new effort. Head of the program is Dianne Zager.</p>

<p>It doesn’t look like you got a reply. I’m looking into this program for my daughter as well. While she doesn’t have Asperger’s (but her sister does), she does have ADHD, depression, and social anxiety issues. These things prevented her from getting the support she needed in her previous college (art school) experience. I’m wondering if you’ve checked into the program in person yet or not.</p>

<p>My daughter is signed up, I’ll let you know how it goes. Head of the program is very good, and they assign coaches to each student. My daughter will live at home, so that takes the dorm experience out of the equation.</p>

<p>Keep us posted. Hope it works out well for your daughter.</p>

<p>My son is an Aspie with the same needs as your daughter. Extremely intelligent. We are interested in the Oasis program. How is she doing? Did she get a scholarship? What type of jobs are the graduates getting? I would love to hear any comments, positive or negative about this program.</p>

<p>I heard that they are going to expand the OASIS program to the Westchester campus next Fall. Right now, though, it looks like my Aspie senior wants to go to college half time and do her horse thing the other half. We told her if she works off part of the cost at the barn that we will let her lease a horse next year. Too much pressure to keep up with school work for us to consider this before she graduates. But we were very impressed with the program.</p>

<p>Sadly, outstanding Director of the OASIS Program, Dianne Zager, just “resigned”, 5 days before Xmas Vacation. This was a serious loss. Reason: University Politics. This had absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Zager’s performance as an administrator or educator. 100% of the parents and 100% of the students adored Dianne. Sadly, education is mostly for the administrators/educators, not the students. Parents have formed a committee to help insure a smooth transition to new director. I will keep you posted. I do not know whether program will be expanded to Westchester. I am keeping my daughter in the program for spring semester. (I have no choice, really)</p>

<p>let us know and also how your daughter manages navigating the university etc</p>

<p>Hi there… I wonder is you are still looking into Oasis for our son. We are in the process of enrolling my son , HFA, but a bit worried about the changes in direction and administration. Need to make a decision very soon as we are looking into two different universities and programs in the NY area. Would really like to share information and thoughts with you.
thanks…!</p>

<p>My son is an accepted student for fall 2012 and he will be participating in OASIS. I was wondering if there are any groups or transitional activities to help the kids get to know each other ahead of time. He would love to build his social network and getting to know the students that he will be spending so much time with going forward would be wonderful. Any thoughts??</p>

<p>I did quite a lot of research regarding the programs in the New York area for my son who is Aspergers. Adelphi also has a wonderful program, one of the most significant differences are that it is up to the student to look for the help there whereas at Pace they push the child to become involved in campus life and utilize services.</p>

<p>Does anyone know what the additional cost for the Oasis program is? We have just started exploring Adelphi and Pace’s programs. Pace definitely looks more comprehensive. We do not need someone to make sure our son gets good grades (which seems to be what the Adelphi support offers). He needs help with social skills and connecting with other people so that he will be able to be a productive, happy person with a life of his own. He is in his second year of college and is missing the social piece altogether. If we knew he really was going to need this type of support we would have applied from h.s. and he would have been eligible for a great scholarship. After trying college without enough support, he no longer has the gpa that would get $$. Does anyone know if they give scholarships for transfer students? Does anyone know if they put the kids in the Oasis program in the same building for dorming? Most importantly, does anyone have a child who is in the program now, and what do you think of it? Thank you!</p>

<p>Daughter still at OASIS at Pace. Things are ok, but loss of Dianne is still a major one. OASIS is really the only turnkey program in NY metro. I don’t want to change colleges, so we have no choice but to stay. You can also reach out to Dianne Zager, I think she is trying to start a program that will service college students at many locations, not just out of Pace. Google her to find her. She still has a professorship at Pace. It’s hard to know what the OASIS program will look like exactly next September, since the admin will be different. We are there hopefully for the full 4 years. Hopefully it will flourish under new management.</p>

<p>Is your son planning on attending Pace Sept. 2012? We are considering it for our son who will be junior next year. I was wondering if you know anyone who has been in the program and the success rate they have. It sounds great. Almost too good to be true.</p>

<p>I am pretty involved with NYU Child Study and have spoken with them at length regarding the OASIS program. Several of their patients have been part of the program and they have mad very good progress and been successful there. My son will also be attending the program in September as an incoming freshman. The cost is about 10000 per year. We live near Huntington so he will probably commute initially so I don’t know that much about the dorms. Sorry!</p>

<p>So far so good, even though we miss Dianne greatly. A few other staff members have also resigned, which is likewise disconcerting. One of Dianne’s skills was recruiting amazing coaches. However, this is the only turnkey program I know of for high functioning kids w ld/autism/asperger’s. Students really must be able to do college-level work. It’s not a remediation program. Some Kids in the program had very high SATS, etc.</p>

<p>Hi all. Is anyone interested in getting kids together or starting some kind of group for them thus summer? My son will be attending in September and he is very nervous about fitting in or anyone liking him. He wants to live in the dorms. Anyone doing that?</p>

<p>And btw we live in Huntington on long island if anyone is close by</p>

<p>My son just left the program and was turned loose with no where to go and nothing to do.
The goal was to get him a paid job before he left.
They got him – at an additional expense mind you – a non paid internship.</p>

<p>He was scheduled to leave in May but after Prof. Dianne Zager was demoted,
the wind and empathy went out of the program.</p>

<p>NOT ONE person contacted us about him leaving.
It was if he didn’t exist anymore.
I complained in an email and the new director, Dr. Mary Cohen, who is really a very organized and Virgo like administrator and not warm and fuzzy at all – Which is Dianne – had the job coach call me. She didn’t have the courtesy to pick up the phone and talk to us. </p>

<p>I have to say I was, and still am furious.
Dianne used to call about stuff at least once a week.
She and I would email regularly about what my son was doing.
Dr. Cohen – nada, zip her secretary would email if they wanted something. </p>

<p>Cohen once got in touch with me because she was fishing around to find out what meds my son was on. He apparently said something about wanting to go off some meds and she made comments to him about it being a lot of meds. Yes Ms. idiot, he’s on a lot of meds because he needs them and he’s able to function in school as he’s on the right mix that has been mixed and matched and changed over 20 years. She encouraged him to get off the meds. I had to go in and see her and listen to her tell me how she works with these kids all the time and knows meds. She knows NOTHING about my son or what he is capable of doing. I refused to let them know the meds he was on because people like her judge by the pills and not by getting to know him. </p>

<p>My son was signed up for two classes a semester which was all he could handle, and the goal, as I said, was for him to have a job so Dianne wanted him to have free time for a job. Once she left, all was kaput. </p>

<p>Often he thought his tutor was going to do something and she didn’t, and then I had to help him at the last second. </p>

<p>He would get an assignment from a professor on a Friday through the Blackboard system, and the professor would email, but he didn’t look at his emails every day due to connection issues, so we wouldn’t see it until Sunday. And then he’d have to scramble to read and write something that wasn’t in the class syllabus.</p>

<p>If you do anything, make sure and get your kid’s email and Pace passwords so you can keep up with what’s expected. Sure my son should have done it, but he didn’t. It’s all part of his executive functioning issues that we constantly have to work on.</p>

<p>The nice thing about Oasis is that they have clout with the dorm – if you don’t mind paying something like $8,000 per semester. He lived at 55 John St. which is near campus but owned by a service. They supply a flat screen TV with hookups for game consoles, a small desk, wifi/internet hookup, a captain’s bed with lots of drawers, a closet, a decent sized refrigerator, a bathroom, a very unsturdy chair with no wheels. </p>

<p>They had him room with another Oasis guy. My son really wanted to help his roommate get more social and take him out to bars and help him get introducted to girls. That just didn’t work out. The kid wouldn’t go with him so my son ended up coming home every weekend and not being engaged in the Oasis social activity on Friday afternoons. They also promised a Sunday excursion but stopped that because they said the kids didn’t want to go as a big group together. Well, then they didn’t do anything at all.</p>

<p>The last semester they finally swapped my son’s room. I should have known there was a reason this other kid wanted to switch so badly. Not sure which of them got the worse deal. Here was another kid that only watched TV and didn’t leave the room on the weekends, and didn’t want to go anywhere with my son, but also never showered or cleaned up after himself. My son, who is a slob himself, was grossed. The parents also moved him entirely out of the room without cleaning up or telling us towards the end of April – long before the end of the semester. So I came up to get a few big items one weekend and he’d moved out. I had to clean the whole room that day as I had a good parking space, and decided I didn’t want to pay for a garage the following weekend to come back and clean again. Its like $115 ticket if you park in the wrong place near the dorm. </p>

<p>FYI The meal plan also didn’t cover the food. We had to keep refilling the card. </p>

<p>Then the social interaction guy that came on after Dianne left supposedly had a weekly meeting with my son that we didn’t find out about until May when I asked him about moving out issues. He told me my son never came to the meetings. Duh, neither of us knew about it (maybe my son knew and forgot but the the kid with a title of professor by the way, never emailed my son to say, hey, you missed the meeting or called or emailed me to say he’s not showing up, let’s figure this out. So there is also a lack of followup as to what they are doing and what you are paying $5,000 a semester for them to do. Yes, the kid emailed every week about a list of activities that someone could do in the city, but so what?</p>

<p>If your child can handle the school work, and the classes are very intense, they should be ok. My son was in a community college upstate which had zero work (while at the Gersh program) and then was at Mercy College also, and I can assure you, Pace is on a whole other level! </p>

<p>Many of the classes have a lot of writing.
My son was taking Environmental Studies classes and took one class in which he had a paper every week, and sometimes two, and had to read 25-page U.S. Supreme Court decisions and other documents that were intense, really way over his head. </p>

<p>The Oasis people do know the professors and know which ones are kinder to the students. His Oasis tutor actually sat in on some of his classes with him and the teacher ccd her on the emails about schoolwork. </p>

<p>Overall, the nurturing parts of the program died once Dianne left. She really knew what every kid was doing, was in touch with them (they all had her cell phone) and was in touch with the parents.
This one – forget it!</p>

<p>I hope that Pace figures this all out and that Dr. Cohen gets her act together and realizes she’s not the best fit for the program. It’s different than what we signed on for. Maybe it’s better for some because she’s an administrator overseeing the people that are tutoring and doing the social interactions, etc. </p>

<p>Would I have signed up with her? Probably not. Way too cold a fish for me. Would have also saved about $100K that would have supported my son when he is old and grey.</p>

<p>The parents group is staying on top of the situation and they are probably mad at me because I’m burning bridges but they are all afraid of retribution for their kids who are left there while mine is out.</p>

<p>I have now been in touch with a program that some of the Oasis former staffers formed and are providing after college job coaching. This is what he needs now, and what he needed right along.</p>

<p>We have had a totally different experience coming in as the transition to a new Director was taking place. Mary Cohen and her staff are knowledgable, caring and go the extra mile for your student and the family. Some parents are not realistic about their goals for their student and therefore, place unrealistic expectations on Oasis. Be honest with yourself, your student and the program, and you will have a much better experience. Happy Folks</p>