1) Boarding Service (March-August 1993)

When Stars and Rain was founded in 1993, there had been no existing service model in China for reference. In addition to the financial difficulty, Stars and Rain faced tremendous professional challenges:

	In China there had been no educators trained in autism. In addition to two voluntary parents whose children attended my class, we could only recruit graduates from pre-school teacher training schools, who had never heard of autism.
	We had no teaching materials aside from one photocopied book on autism originally published in Taiwan.
	In China, there had been little awareness on programs needed to assist children with learning disability.

We started our first class of six children as a boarding school where parents brought their children to school on Monday and picked them up on Saturday afternoon. We had six staff serving the six children, and we were teachers during the day and nannies during the night. Although we encouraged parents to come to the class, it was not a requirement. Nevertheless, their participation became the seed of our parent-focused training program in the later years.

2) Beginning of Parents Participation (September 93-September 95)

In September 1993, Stars and Rain was forced to move to another location for the third time, where the landlord forbade overnight stay on the premise. Our classes had to be restricted to day-care only. I noticed that the children were difficult with us after a weekend or holiday break. We realized that the children’s family life strongly influenced their behavior, and parents’ involvement in the training would directly impact the children’s progress.

We decided to give the parents daily homework and establish parent’s diary, a daily account of their children’s behavior at home. We also held teacher/parent meeting on a biweekly basis and required all parents to attend. These measures were our first attempt of systematical parent training. We helped parents understand autism and made them realize that to hand over their child to a professional institution was not sufficient and their involvement was crucial for their children to achieve long-term success.

3) Beginning of Parent-Focused Training (October 95-January 98)

As Stars and Rain became known, we received more applications from all over China, but limited by our space and staff, we were not able to offer places to all of them. We also worried how parents from other cities could cope with the program financially in a long term.

To resolve these problems, we changed the program from an open-ended one to a finite term of three months and held four terms per year to lower the parent’s financial burden. During the three-month period, we required parents to attend the class with their children and focused our training on parents to teach their children themselves. The role of our teachers shifted to overseeing the process, to demonstrate, guide and correct the parents teaching. We expanded the previous individual therapy program to each family, and parents must follow our teacher’s guidance to implement the program. After the three-month program, parents would receive a family training plan based on the evaluation of the term. After the family left our school, we administered a six-month follow-up program to monitor their progress. After the six months, the parent and the child could choose to return to our school for one-week re-evaluation and test.

4) Professional Standard Established (February 98-present)

In February 1997 with the support of donations we managed to buy a house in a village in the southeast Chaoyang District, where our present facility is located. After Tian Huiping’s visit to Eden Services in New Jersey, USA, we completed our curriculum of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) training.

	Starting in February 1998, we held ABA lectures for parents on every Friday and required parents to apply the skills during the week working with their children.
	Encourage parents to “learn a new professional for the sake of their children” and establish weekly testing system to evaluate parents’ operational skills.
	Establish professional standard based on ABA methods, and implement a teacher training, testing and grading system to evaluate and enhance staff professional competence. With support of voluntary parents, we held outreaching short-term training programs outside Beijing.