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Students in the high school program at Potomac's Ivymount School really understand the business of learning. That's because each homeroom class organizes its own business — they include The Breakfast Nook and Lil'Giant — in order to teach students real-world skills, from counting money to customer service to ordering supplies.

For the students, many of whom have autism, the real-world skills are invaluable, educators there say. "The obvious end goal is helping them to be as independent as they can be," said Deni Brancheau, Ivymount high school director.

The Ivymount School serves just over 200 students from ages 4-21, and has programs for students with a wide range of disabilities including autism, Aspberger's Syndrome, and developmental delays. The school also runs an outreach program and consults with people who have autism spectrum disorders in the community.

Recently, the school has also begun to function as a training ground for future professionals who may someday be working with children with autism. Through a partnership with the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at the Children's National Medical Center, future child development professionals began rotations through the school this month — getting the chance to observe how children with autism are taught in a school setting.

Touring the school's high school program Friday, Kelly Register-Brown, a physician who is applying to residency programs in hopes of becoming a child psychiatrist, said she was impressed by the school's programs, and the hands-on experience the high school students receive through their business training. "This has been a wonderful thing for me to see as a future practicing psychiatrist," Register-Brown said.

Register-Brown and other aspiring child development professionals visit Ivymount once a week for about a month as fellows from the LEND program, or Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities. The LEND program at the Children's National Medical Center is a wide-scale training program for future professionals learning to treat children with a variety of neurodevelopmental disabilities, part of a larger federally-funded program nationwide.

"It's an interdisciplinary program, meaning it's not just training physical therapists to be physical therapists or social workers to be social workers," said Guy Lotrecchiano, who manages the LEND program at Children's. "It trains all those different disciplines to work together as a team with other disciplines in caring for children with usually pretty complex situations on their hands."

The LEND program at Children's was among 17 LEND programs across the country that recently received funding through Congress via the Combating Autism Act, allowing for the programs to create new training supplements geared at autism.

LEND fellows at Children's who take part in the autism supplement "rotate" through sites that include Ivymount and clinics at the Children's National Medical Center in order to get a wide-angle view of how children on the spectrum are identified and treated.

According to Lauren Kenworthy, director of the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders, autism is increasing in prevalence. One of every 150 children is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, meaning that future physicians are likely to encounter it in their careers.

"I think what a young developing health care professional would get out of this program is exposure to the full range of ways that a person on the autism spectrum can present," Kenworthy said. "…They'll see a rich range of kids on the autism spectrum and get exposure to how we evaluate those kids, how we identify them and how we help them."

Ivymount is the only rotation site that is a school, lending the fellows a sense of how children with autism spectrum disorders are treated day-to-day, said Janet Wintrol, Ivymount's director.

"These are real-life kids — we're the ground troops," Wintrol said.