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Joshua Stowe giggled nonstop from the oversized blue chair as music vibrated beneath him.

Later, in another chair, the 7-year-old from Rochester bounced up and down as he fingered spaghetti-shaped fiberoptic lights.

At New Horizon School in Beaver County, which serves 171 special needs students ages 5 to 21, the sensory therapy room is fun and therapeutic.

"We are seeing so many benefits," said Maureen Burns, a speech and language pathologist at the school. "Kids go right to what they need. They decide what they want to do."

Sensory therapy is a relatively new technique that started in Europe to help students who experience problems with smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing.

Special needs students can struggle with balance and feedback from the muscles and joints, Burns said. New Horizon's sensory room opened last year in a former classroom through a memorial donation from the family of Jack LaNeve.

On Monday afternoon, Burns asked Alexa Thewes, 10, of Freedom to tell her the colors on the buttons that control the lights inside a floor-to-ceiling bubbling aqua column. Thewes is normally quiet but used sign language to tell Burns the answers before going back to watching the colors change.

Jeremiah Gruber, 6, of Blackhawk normally speaks so quietly his teacher has a hard time hearing him. But in the sensory room, he yelled his teacher's name into a "ladder light" that illuminates more colors the louder he speaks.

New Horizon is a public special education school overseen by the Beaver Valley Intermediate Unit. It has been in Brighton since 1974 and is one of the few of its kind left, since the push began to integrate special needs students in schools, said Docia Jacobs, special education supervisor.

The home districts of the students pay fees for their attendance and are responsible for transportation. The students come from across southwestern Pennsylvania, including Allegheny County.

"It's amazing," Jacobs said. "How they come off the bus, then go into the sensory room, and then can go into the classroom. You really have to see it."

Burns said she works with some children who are nonverbal in most situations. One boy had a bad day, but calmed down in the sensory room and twice said "friend today" and "what I need."

"I had a young autistic boy who rarely spoke," she said. "But he came out of the sensory room and said 'like a dream.' "

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