Autism teacher wins statewide acclaim

A Riverside County special education teacher who created an award winning program for autistic children won statewide acclaim this year. Ruth Prystash, who works with children in a Riverside County Office of Education (RCOE) classroom at the Rob Reiner Center in Perris, was selected as a semi-finalist for State Teacher of the Year.

Prystash has been a teacher for 30 years, six at Rob Reiner. She is best known for founding the Reach Autism Program. This innovative program has been studied and duplicated across the county – and country -- to benefit autistic children. She has literally trained hundreds of teachers in the Reach program.

It is estimated by the Centers for Disease Control that one in 10 children born in the United States will have behaviors that fall in within the autism spectrum, or 36,500 children born each year. The CDC estimates that 730,000 people born in the last two decades will fall in the spectrum.

Prystash was one of three Riverside County Teachers of the Year. The others were Melissa Casady, an English teacher at Great Oak High School in Temecula. She has been a teacher for nine years, starting at Chaparral High School, also in the Temecula Valley Unified School District, and Kevin Roughton, a Social Studies and AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) seventh-grade teacher at Jurupa Middle School. He has been a teacher for seven years.