Whitney Williams, DPT

Written by Mollard Consulting

Whitney Williams has always loved playing sports and exercising. She studied exercise physiology at Miami University with the hopes of going into the sports medicine field as a physical therapist. When she graduated with her undergraduate degree in 2009, she decided to take a year off to work as a home health aide for two different families with boys with autism.

“I became a part of their families. I was working so closely and so intimately with them, and those two kids grabbed my heart from the beginning,” shares Whitney.  

As a home health aide, she performed home-based ABA intervention and took the boys to outside therapy appointments. Her first exposure to Bridgeway Academy came through one of the boys’ speech therapy sessions with Abby David, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director. “I still really wanted to do physical therapy, but I saw this new world of pediatric therapy,” Whitney explains. While in physical therapy school at Ohio University, her path crossed again with Bridgeway Academy through an eight-week clinical rotation in 2013. She fell in love with the kids and became dead set on working there. A few months after her rotation, she began working full-time for Bridgeway Academy, and about a year later became the PT department manager.

Working with children with autism is not a traditional setting for a physical therapist.

“Physical therapy school is a doctoral level program, full-time, super intensive three-year program. We had one pediatric class, and in that class we had one lecture on autism” Whitney explains. “It was a scary jump coming to Bridgeway Academy. I had to ask myself, ‘Am I really willing to give up 99% of the content I learned in school to go down this path?’” But she knew the answer was “yes.” 

“You have to have a passion for the kids because it’s not your traditional physical therapy life of rehabbing injuries and having people in your case load for a couple of weeks and then moving them on,” Whitney explains. “There’s a lot of ‘I don’t know what to do next’ because there’s no protocol like there is for a hip replacement. It’s a lot of trial and error and letting the kids lead you and you figuring it out along the way.” 

For Whitney, it’s about the small victories. It’s about meeting goals the kids have had for a year. It’s about watching them achieve a milestone you helped them accomplish. While the families she worked with as a home health aide played a huge role in getting her into the field, Jack, one of her current students, has kept her going.

“When I first started working with Jack he was on the lower level of the primary building and didn’t leave his classroom. All of the therapists came to him because he couldn’t physically move around the building,” says Whitney. “I remember the first time we had Jack go upstairs. I had a teacher help me move his legs up the stairs, and when we got him to the therapy room it opened up a whole new world for him. There were swings, a crash pad, balls, and other things he had never seen and was unable to access before.”

Now, Jack goes up and down stairs and walks in the hallway independently. 

Through Bridgeway Academy’s collaborative nature, Whitney and therapists in other departments work to incorporate each other’s therapies into their sessions.

“Jack uses a communication device and the speech therapist wasn’t having a lot of success with him using it. We decided to start treating together because Jack is so motivated by the sensory equipment in physical therapy,” Whitney explains. “During a PT/speech session we were doing an obstacle course and at the end we would blow bubbles. For the first time, he put two words together through his device to say, ‘More bubbles.’ It’s all about helping kids experience the moments when they reach a new level from what they thought they could achieve.” 

Another example of a collaborative success is the Page to Stage program, a multi-disciplinary theatre group to target goals for each therapy department.

“We have been going through the book Alice in Wonderland and breaking up each scene into an activity for physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and music therapy and putting it all together into a social group. We’ve seen a lot of progress with it,” says Whitney. “The kids love it. One of the games we play is modeled after Alice meeting the caterpillar on the mushroom. We have the kids lay upside down over a therapy ball and do sit-ups, and when they come up, they say, as the caterpillar does, ‘Who are you?’” 

Despite Bridgeway Academy’s success in co-treating and collaboration, there have been challenges. Therapists within the physical therapy department are split between the primary and secondary school buildings and are only together as a team once a week for half an hour.

“We really want to get back to focusing on the development of the department through collaboration and bouncing ideas off each other. When we don’t see our colleagues, it means that we don’t observe each other treat and we don’t learn from each other. It’s a missed opportunity to grow. We’ve done a good job and have stayed positive, but the biggest challenge is that we don’t feel cohesive,” Whitney explains. 

The physical therapy department has grown significantly over the past six years from two and a half physical therapists to six and a half physical therapists. But it wasn’t that long ago that everyone, in all departments, was together in one building.

“People at the primary building don’t know what goes on at the secondary building, and vice versa. Overall there is a gap in understanding because the programming is so different between buildings,” says Whitney. With the campaign to build one campus, teachers and therapists will again share one building and the critical element of staff collaboration will fall back into place. 

Bridgeway Academy’s new campus will be one level to improve accessibility for children who use wheelchairs, walkers, and other assistive equipment.

“Therapy is on the third floor at the primary building. We’ve had to turn kids away from therapy services because we can’t accommodate them,” says Whitney. “But a huge part of what we see kids for is their inability to do stairs. From a gross motor standpoint, it’s pretty easy to slip through the cracks. There aren’t many milestones up to age three that parents know to look out for, so a lot of the time stairs are one of the first red flags we notice.”

At the new campus, the physical therapy department will have a set of training stairs to incorporate into their therapy sessions.

While gross motor skills aren’t affected as much as communication and fine motor skills, over 75% of kids with autism have gross motor skill delays.

“A lot of kids with autism have a hard time with socialization and lack communication skills. But when you think about how kids interact with their peers, it’s usually through play,” Whitney explains. “Physical therapy lays the foundation to make sure kids have the gross motor skills to engage in play so they can use the fine motor and communication skills they learn in occupational and speech therapies.” For instance, Whitney describes a kid who wanted to learn how to ride a bike because he knew that he stood out from his friends. “We worked on riding a bike all summer. Eventually he became independent with it and was able to do the same activity as his friends,” shares Whitney. 

Whitney was drawn to working with kids with autism by their innocence and potential.

“When I tell people where I work the reaction is ‘How do you do it?’” says Whitney. “From a physical therapy standpoint, this is a hard job. Others see it as a challenge to put the effort into getting to know the clients and having an impact on their lives, but really, I would say that they are the ones impacting us. Although it’s hard work, it’s so rewarding.”