Tom Liniak remembers how excited his 13-year-old son, Jon, was the first time he put on his new, white apron.
“His face,” Liniak said. “It was phenomenal.”
Jon was pumped up in the days before his first day of school, his father said.
“He has a brother who is 11,” he said. “He [was] going around the house saying, ‘I am going to work at Spagnvola. I am going to work at Spagnvola. I have a job.’ ”
Jon is the first intern at Spagnvola, a chocolatier in the Kentlands neighborhood of Gaithersburg.
But this experience will be more than just a job for Jon, who has autism, Liniak said.
In the unpaid internship, Jon will learn what “work” really is, he said; he will be taught the social skills and other qualifications he will need to transition from school to a full-time career.
Eric and Crisoire Reid, who own Spagnvola, have formed a partnership with Tom Liniak and his wife, Natalie, who together founded Sports Plus, a Gaithersburg-based nonprofit organization that provides sports, camps and social programs for children with autism and other developmental disabilities.
Sports Plus will run the internship, where students will help prepare the chocolate into truffles and bars in the factory basement of Spagnvola’s shop and ship the products to customers nationwide.
Sports Plus’s board of advisers, which includes doctors, executives, special-education workers and physical and speech therapists, will often visit and help the organization develop a program to successfully transition the students, Liniak said.
So far, the interns are Sports Plus clients, but the Liniaks plan to expand the program to others.
Marcy Bennett, who is on Sports Plus’s board of directors, said this program could become a model for companies that want to better understand how to successfully employ adults with disabilities.
Bennett is the program administrator for Jewish Foundation for Group Homes’ Meaningful Opportunities for Successful Transitions program, which facilitates successful transitions into the workplace for young adults with disabilities.
The internship was created to benefit the children, but researchers and experts in the field can learn just as much from it, Liniak said.
“How do we get these kids to do this by themselves for the rest of their lives?” he said. “We are willing to learn as much as we can.”
More children are being diagnosed with autism every year.
The most recent numbers, from 2006, show that one in 110 children in the United States has autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is a 57 percent increase since 2002, according to the statistics.
Of students with autism, 47 percent had jobs a few years after high school, according to the 2009 National Longitudinal Transition Study 2, funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Of Maryland residents ages 21 to 64 with any kind of cognitive disability, about 31.9 ercent were employed in 2009, according to a 2009 Cornell University survey.
One of the greatest challenges for people with autism is learning social skills, said Andrew Egel, a professor at the University of Maryland and an expert in applied behavior analysis and its application to education for people with autism.
“That is not to say that people with autism cannot be taught social skills and taught to work in that situation,” he said.
Egel said that in the past, people with autism mostly worked in jobs out of the public eye, such as in workshops building equipment. But with new technology and understanding of autism, more jobs are becoming available in the community environment.
Although cognitive abilities vary, some people with autism are good at sorting and can learn well visually. They might succeed in jobs requiring those skills, Egel said.
At Spagnvola, interns can look at pictures on the walls to see where the chocolate comes from: the cacao trees on the Reids’ estate in the Dominican Republic.
The company name originated from a map that had named the island of the Dominican Republic “Isola Spagnvola.”
Eric Reid said Sports Plus’s mission blew him and his wife away, so they want them to use their store in any way they wish.
He wants to give back to his community, he said.
Jon started working there last month. His first job is to sort pieces of shells from tubs of ground cacao beans to prepare the chocolate.
Recognizing patterns is one of Jon’s talents, Tom Liniak said.
On Friday, Jon said he wants to work at Spagnvola for a “long time.”
“Because I’m good at it,” he said.
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