The Search for a New School

I have talked to enough people and had enough experiences of my own with the school district to know that there will not be any school run by the school district that will meet Thelly's needs. They allocate their resources based on the severity of a child's problems. Since Thelly's problems are minor on the over all scale, he only qualifies for minor services. In other words not a special school with a program specifically tailored to fit his needs.

So I started looking at private schools. The private school the Migilicutty went to for 7th grade started an Autism program last year. It is separate from their regular program and the tuition is three times as much. But I figured if all of my kids are in school full time, I shouldn't have any trouble making enough money to pay for it. Brent joked that we should only have to pay a little bit of the extra tuition because Thelly is only a little bit autistic. And I laughed at that. But then I started thinking that it made a little bit of sense. He doesn't necessarily need to be entirely in their special program. In fact since they have such small class sizes he could probably be in the regular program and just have the teachers get a little extra help from the specialized teachers.

But it doesn't work that way. He's either in their "cross-over" program or he's not. And after meeting with them it was very clear that this was not the right school for him. I met with the director of the program and another mother who has a 9 year old with autism. The entire meeting was a reminder to me of why I've never been able to say "I have a son who is has Autism." I am not like those women. And Thelly is not like their sons.

The whole meeting with filled with terms like "children affected by autism" and "children on the spectrum," who are differentiated from "neuro-typical" children. And there were a million acronyms that they used fluently and expected me to understand like RDI and ABA and IEP (well yes, I know that one). The conversation included discussions of actions that were "behavioral" or "task avoidance" as opposed to...I can't remember what but I believe it would refer to something they had to do because of their atypical neuro-functioning. (I just made that one up, but if we're going to talk about neuro-typical shouldn't we also be able to call our kids neuro-atypical?)

These women had never met each other before but they knew all the same people in the community of "families affected by autism" and they are a part of all the same support groups. And there's nothing wrong with that. Except that I find it rather nauseous. And I know that I don't fit with them.

But mostly I know I don't fit with them because my son is not like theirs. In additional to all the buddy, buddy, we define ourselves as mothers of children with autism talk, there was a lot of talk about what the program at the school would be like. Each child would be evaluated individually and given tasks and assignments that would meet their own needs and help them to progress. But when the examples given are things like "teaching the child to clean a table" or "deliver a piece of mail with written instruction that tell him to say 'good morning Mrs. Jones' when he walks in the room", I start to think that this isn't the program for my son who has done all of the laundry for our whole family for the last two weeks and delivered birthday invitations to all his friends three days earlier.

I know Thelly isn't quite normal. I know he has some Autistic-like behaviors. But I haven't taught him to define himself as an Autistic kid. I treat him like a normal kid and I have rather normal expectations of him. For all these women talking about "children with Autism" rather than Autistic children, there's no doubt that they see their kids as Autistic. That's who they are. They are not normal, they don't belong with normal children and they never will.

So when they talk about "inclusion" which is a big part of the program at this school the whole thing starts to get ridiculous. We would be taking a child who has always been included, who has never been rejected by his peers, who is perfectly happy to hang out with other kids, who probably knows that he isn't exactly like the other boys his age but isn't sure quite why and doesn't think a whole lot about it, and we would be separating him from the normal kids and telling him that he doesn't fit with them because he is one of the retards (I don't care if you call it the cross-0ver program or the Autism program or the weirdos, it all means the same thing to the kids at that school.) And then at some point they would walk him across the play ground to the "neuro-typical" classroom and ask the kids in that room, who up until this year were his peers (one of them is in our ward so this is literally true) and ask them to be nice to him and pretend to include him. But we all know that they never will really include him ever again, because we have told them and him that he is not one of them.

I left the school unsettled and frustrated but at that point I had not formulated all of the above in to coherent thoughts. They were just general impressions of unease and I still didn't really have any other options so I was thinking that I might still send him there. I took an intake and a registration form and told the director that I would talk to my husband and then call her on Monday.