About the Curriculum

Teaching Critical Skills to Keep Individuals Safe!

Healthy Relationships was developed by teachers and counselors at Wesley Schools, in collaboration with Dr. Lawrence Sutton, a psychologist with extensive experience and publications on working with individuals with autism and various other abilities. Our team saw a need to teach critical social & life skills to our students and young adults that wasn’t being addressed proactively in our classrooms. We knew that understanding these skills would allow individuals to be safer, more fully included in all aspects of life, and to have meaningful relationships with friends, family, and others.

We wanted to be proactive versus always reacting to situations!

The program covers:

• Hygiene
• Safety when online
• Personal space
• Private vs public
• Making safe choices with the people they encounter
• Who really is a friend
• Breaking social norms and boundaries
• Restroom safety
• Health
• Understanding their bodies
• Understanding consent, no means no
• Navigating personal relationships, like best friends and dating
• And many more

These skills are essential for individuals with various abilities, yet they remain the community’s most significant unmet need. Healthy Relationships offers a strong foundation for educators or counselors to teach these skills, along with resources for parents and caregivers to support and reinforce lessons at home. As a result, individuals are better prepared for the next stage of life.

A Resource Created to Be Effective: Like many in our field, we consistently sought materials to teach essential skills for keeping our students and individuals safe. From the outset, our goal was to leverage the extensive expertise of our special education teachers, counselors, and school psychologists to create a genuinely useful and practical program for our students and others!