Aspies For Freedom

I graduate from high school in less than two months, and they're still yet to conduct their line of assessments (it's everything from IQ tests to self-help/adaptive skills to fine/gross motor to vision/hearing and even more I think I'm leaving out). I was dx'd with Aspergers in elementary school, and was on 504 until 10th grade, when I got an IEP under Speech/Language. Apparently, as it turns out, autism isn't even marked on the IEP form. We couldn't even find a copy of my original paperwork from the elementary school that records this diagnosis, so we have the psychologist from the elementary school forwarding us a note of some sort. The school has been kind of mysterious about these evaluations to me, as they say that it's not going to change the services at all (I get 30 minutes speech every week or two and some extra time on assignments - not suitable for me individually, and it's really hard just to keep up with my classes to not fail them, and I especially don't want to jeopardize some substantial scholarships I got from the college I'm attending this fall).

I'm trying to figure out maybe what is going on that I'm not seeing - why is the school being so mysterious about this? One reason for the evaluations being done so late is because they're testing the younger people who don't have any IEP yet first (which doesn't make much sense at all to me).

I think one thing it's been so hard to get the IEP right is because I have trouble to express what it is I'm having trouble with, let alone with saying what I want or need. I brought the AlphaSmart to type things, but the meetings only last about 30 minutes, and that's way too quick for me to come up with writing what I need to write (also they changed the day of the IEP meeting at the last minute, so I wasn't prepared for it). I think something they're having difficulty with is that since I'm not verbalizing what's going on, it's all to easy to not see or to see wrongly what's going on.

Some of the things that I have trouble with:
-Expressing that I don't understand something to an instructor (or other reasons for speaking)
-sensory overload, particularly during labs
-comprehension of instructions, especially verbal or written
-extreme difficulty with summary (on most occasions can't do at all)
-speaking (especially when stressed or towards end of the day, as speaking already takes up inoordinate energy and is even harder when my energy reserves are low)
-learning new vocabulary words (where repetition isn't helping much at all)
-processing spoken language
-initiating tasks/movements (from the time it clicks in my mind what I'm supposed to be doing, it takes some time - typically between a few seconds to a few minutes - to actually physically do that thing)
-ORGANIZATION, and remembering assignments

The thing is, I have a hard time with coming up with what to do about these in the IEP. Just making this list has taken several hours. Does anyone have suggestions I can forward to the director of special services? Thanks!

Not sure about "other reasons," but you could perhaps have some type of signal to alert an instructor that you are not understanding.  Or instructors could solicit feedback -- "If you don't understand raise your hand."

Perhaps being allowed to communicate via email?

Assignments are on a webpage, handout, email, whatever, so that you can have assistance decoding it?

I think the important thing here is that instructors be aware of this so that they to not harass you when you appear to be off-task. A few seconds to a few minutes is not a big deal, but if the instructor draws attention to you it becomes a big deal.

My day planner saved me in college. I got one that had a page for each day and time slots for every 15 minute increment.  I lived by my day planner.  Write absolutely everything in it, no matter how trivial and obvious it seems.

Well, I don't know if these are good suggestions or not, and I skipped some that I couldn't think of anything. It seems that educators would have seen these issues before and have recommendations.

It should seem that way. But I guess since I learned things mostly at home on my own before and outside of school, so I would score well on tests, they figured I was excelling at learning at school, instead of regurgitating things I'd learned years ago outside of school. Even though in the past six years (four of which are at this school) I start out okay in the beginning, but things fall apart and each year at second semester I nearly fail out (I need a 2.0 GPA to stay here). That I had this knowledge before school helped me out in some ways, but in other ways it hid so many of these learning and processing difficulties that I have, so that even though the last few years I've been trying to convey to the director of special services these things, it's like she always forgets, since she never responds to my concerns. I think she has it too stuck in her mind this image of me as the "bright but socially awkward kid with Asperger Syndrome who should have no problem with daily living skills, academics, or speaking".

Also, the special services people at this school are (for the most part) quite ignorant in dealing with autistics, though we have a fair amount of people on the spectrum at our school. The director of special services got frustrated with me on a day when I couldn't speak and she was talking quicker at me, and I typed "How can you expect me to speak now?" and she replied, "Of course I expect you to speak." These are the same people who assumed that their suggestions to an autistic 8th grader that something might not be such a nice or good idea would be automatically interpreted as "that will get you in trouble despite it not being explicitly forbidden in the school rules so don't do it" and so took away his Internet access at school, and who tried to send me home out of class for spinning (silently) in my chair during independent study. What really perplexes me is how they saw fit to test everybody else (who is in grades 7 - 11) first before me. What, are they trying to prevent from dropping the ball for other students as they've done for me?