B"H

I would like to ask the Forum a free flowing question.  Are any of you familiar with this possible scenario:

An Autistic child of unusually high intelligence has been placed in Special Education by the School District due to "behavioral issues."  This child crossed the wrong teacher in the First Grade.  This young person is at an academic level that is actually above his/her peers, and is not all that "behaviorally challenged."  The parents are willing, but are unable to challenge these circumstances.  Again, I repeat, the parents are unable to challenge these circumstances, so we cannot challenge that parameter at this time.  In this scenario, they would challenge this travesty if they could, but they absolutely cannot.

My question is this; what can sympathetic school teachers, workers, or Aides do to bring this child to his/her full potential.  In this scenario, Special Education does not form as an aid to a child's development.  It is a form of oppression that is foisted upon the child.  How do we free that child so that he or she can transcend that prison, and come to a place in which services are provided while this child soars?  Or, conversely, how do we subvert the prison while the child remains in Special Education?

I cannot comment on whether this is connected to any specific problem.  And, if it *IS* the case that this is a real scenario, I can give no specifics.  Therefore, you will have to answer the question with what I have provided.  In essence, I am asking how it is that a bright Autistic child escapes the Special Education Penitentiary.  I am also asking how a guard would conceivably assist in the escape.    

If this is a real scenario, there would not be much that I could do.  However, if it is real, there might be others who would be in a position to follow your advice.  If you are unable to answer this query, you might also want to share your own experiences in Special Education Prison if you were placed there due to "behavioral reasons" more than any actual need. Thank you.    



All the best.

This is a very typical scenario as it occurs in Australia. The child is identified as having "behavioural issues". So behavioural issues = ADHD (whether diagnosed or not) = Special ed. Classes (whether appropriate or not). This is usually done by "ascertainment" or what I refer to as "pigeonholing".

Once you have an "ascertainment" there is no escape. My son copped this in spite of being gifted and was placed into classes well below his academic level. There was no real solution as the existing school refused. So a move to another school was the only viable solution sorry to say. But that darn ascertainment still followed.

But, in the meantime, at the existing school, an intense home schooling (tutoring) program at higher academic levels was used as well as social development (I was the tutor). Then, when the marks came from the existing school, the results were well above what was expected.

So when transferring him to the new school, we could point to above levels of achievment and have the child placed into much more appropriate mainstream classes.

So onto the hypothetical. If the parents are unable to move the child, a course of home tuition at higher levels is probably the only course of action available. Over time the problem teacher may drop out of the system and the child may be moved to more appropriate classes when the academic talent is recognised. A big MIGHT.

Repeatedly, it seems that the professionals slavishly put bright special ed kids through the same curricula as the not so bright special ed kids.

The last time I experienced that was in the Community Living Skills Training floor at the Maryland Rehabilitation Center in Baltimore in spring 1999.  I had to sit in on the math class: arithmetic 101.

Arithmetic 101!

The last math I had was matrix algebra in Fall 1995 at Marshall University, before that, introductory statistics at Marshall University in Spring 1994.  And not much difficulty with old high school algebra I and II, geometry, and trigonometry, or college-level algebra at Shepherd either.  The only reason I had trouble with intro stats at Shepherd was because I was emotionally crippled.  The prof said I would either get C or an incomplete- I got the C.  I was fine over the summer- I learned stats all by myself with just the damn book.

Maybe it is easier to teach all the kids the same thing at once.

I do know that I was reading at grade level back in elementary school, unlike my classmates.  I was an Aspie, that's all.  I had no academic learning disabilities, just social learning disabilities.  This is not a boast this is a fact.  I still felt like a retard because I had people my age to tell me how retarded I was acting.  (The social behavior might resemble MR/DD but the kids don't know any better not to judge IQ by social behavior)

But hey, still the academic curriculum was lacking at the middle school level.  No pre-algebra.  No life science, no physical science, no environmental science.  All were external mainstream classes.

I'm glad I got out, graduated.  They let me graduate in 8th grade.  They did not let my brother graduate.  Mom graduated him by force.

While I haven't been placed exclusively in a special education classroom, I have been in some part-time, though most of the issues I have with the particular classrooms I've been in are about how I was viewed an treated by staff, rather than academic complaints.

However, I have spent many years at school, most of those years, in fact, being not challenged enough in some major ways. Of course, due to numerous learning, perceptual, and attentional difficulties, though, for me things sort of evened out grade-wise, though neither aspect was particularly fun.

I did not get the joy I was supposed to get from having an "easy" curriculum, which was further complicated by genuine difficulties I had in addition to my strengths, and this further added to attention difficulties and encouraged me to pay even less attention than I was already paying, and this reluctant attitude often got all of my attention and learning difficulties attributed to a "bad attitude", however much I tried to clarify the specifics of my difficulties.

I would encourage a child who is in such a situation to learn on his/her own, maybe by asking them what sorts of things they're interested in, and then bringing them a book or two on the subject, or if it's something they have workbooks for, to try to acquire a workbook in the subject. If the subject is math, then it could be as simple as giving them a logic/math puzzle on a piece of paper and asking them to solve it.

For me, the best education has not come from the schools anyway, and I've had a LOT of lucky breaks in acquiring exceptional academic instruction, at least compared to most people. I even had the opportunity to skip ahead to AP Calculus and AP Physics without having taken the pre-requisite courses, though unfortunately issues related to my history class and teacher caused me to have to quit my chemistry and calculus classes, and de-railed my records of physics homework, so that despite getting "B"s and "C"s on exams and straight A on labs (which is generally my weakest grade in science), I got a "D" in the class, and so now the school seems highly reluctant to let anyone else do the same (though fortunately not many math and science whizzes go to that school, so it's not like a whole bunch of people are missing out on the opportunity, which many students would consider an unnecessary torment).

But, that's not where I learned my physics, though my chemistry and calculus teachers taught me a bunch, and very well - where I learned my physics was through reading books, using MIT OpenCourseWare, buying and reading college textbooks, and, last but not least, the most powerful form of edification of all - QUESTIONS!

To wrestle with a question without following it to its resolution has more educational potential energy than all of the worked out problems of all of the textbooks combined. Often, the mere posing of a question that is either without definite resolution or which requires a much deeper understanding of the subject than the individual likely possesses, will be the thing that triggers a person's interest in a subject, and gives the motivation necessary to go through with disciplined study.

After all, how many people are interested in physics because they saw a demonstration of an inclined plane? How many are interested because they were curious about what light really is, or whether the cat is dead or alive, and how can it be both?

The educational system is really not equipped to deal with the gifted/LD combination; and that's a real shame because that is not a particularly uncommon state of affairs. At least half of the people in my (real life) Asperger's support group qualify as both gifted and either learning disabled or else having such a unique style of learning that traditional classrooms do them little good (ADHD, anyone?). And that's not limited to 130+ IQs, either; some people with otherwise average processing power have high level of skill in one or more areas that gets completely ignored because the school is trying to work on their deficits and ignoring what they're good at.

The problem isn't the "special education prison"; it's that special education simply isn't equipped, in many places, to educate children with one or more talents that are high above average. When you need special education, the assumption is that the area you need it for is pretty much representative of your other capabilities--but it isn't. It isn't even true about non-autistic kids in special ed; and when you get to the wide scatter of the autistic mind, there's very little they know; and either your deficits or your talents get ignored.

"Twice exceptional" kids don't seem to fit anywhere. Put them in gifted/talented programs, and their behavioral, sensory, and learning disabilities get in the way. Put them in special education, and you end up with wasted potential.

Solution? Well, it's not getting rid of special ed or getting autistic kids out of it. If you're in special ed because you have problems with the normal classroom, kicking you out and throwing you to the wolves isn't going to do any good. I'd much rather that they would (as in some places they already are doing) combine special education and gifted education into one department--one where you could be a sixth grader in third grade English and tenth grade math, where you could crawl under a weighted blanket, get social skills lessons, join the orchestra, and win the science fair all in the same day.

When you're close enough to average that you can learn from education aimed at the average, there aren't too many problems. Being either all above or all below average isn't too hard to place, either. But when you're both above and below, both gifted and delayed, the school system simply doesn't know what to do with you.

Word.  If you don't fit neatly into one box, you're an inconvenience.

I've always thought that special ed should be combined with GATE programs--after all, they have basically the same goal.

A big issue with this system is often IEP goals--they're usually written with the idea of getting the student up to a normal level, while ignoring areas whre they've far surpassed this andare despertley in need of intellectual stimulation

Yes - and also for me the IEP goals were mostly irrelevant to the things I really needed help with, and nothing was really done to help me toward those or any other goals. It was more like putting paperwork for show, so they could say, "oh yes, we're addressing her needs".

Speech therapy, when it did occur, was focusing on things I didn't need help with - non-literal language and social interactions - while completely ignoring things like spontaneous speech (which, when accomplished, is usually quite clumsy and difficult to understand, and also I have very long time delays if I want to communicate something essential, like being ill, and nobody ever has tried to help me better identify and communicate stuff like this, despite the fact that this is probably the most important thing I should be taught).

In fact, the only time during my IEP that speech has been remotely helpful was the beginning of one 20-minute session with a new speech therapist, except that in short order she de-railed it into trying to convince me that eye contact is pretty much the most important thing for social and work relationships despite my direct experience otherwise, and each time I tried to get back on topic she would go back to it. She wasn't nearly as bad as the previous speech therapist (who yelled at me during testing because I wasn't getting the "right" answers..WTF...and grabbed at my purse and arm during the IEP meeting), but she too got fired in short order. Still wasn't as bad as the year before, when the speech therapist who didn't do anything helpful either actually de-railed it to debating whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt (she was against it), after I had mentioned that I go to the gay-straight alliance club after she asked what I did Thursday at lunch. Last summer she moved to Texas, though, which is why we got this barrage of about three speech teachers in a year.

And then we got a new speech therapist who was nice and seemed to know a lot more what he was doing, but we didn't really do much at all, and there were only a couple sessions anyway. How the heck does the school expect me to take them seriously? That high school definitely didn't seem to take me or my needs seriously, dismissing them on the basis of academic achievement, and was unprofessional and disorganized.

It wasn't until IQ testing showed my scores to be at normal and low normal levels that they got all concerned and describing me as having "degraded" when in fact I've gained many skills in communication and independence in the last few years, which apparently doesn't matter when you stim more and score low in tests that require you to define words such as 'bicycle' using other words!  I can see how such a system could easily ignore the talents of a person who is referred and looked at through the basis of deficits.

Exactly. That is their goal. Make it paperwork look good enough for when the state auditors check the files, because that's where the $$$ is gained or lost.

I have a special ed for gifted education and taught in two states where "gifted" was a special education category. That gave us the legal grounds to combine services and prevented the schools from bumping a kid out of the gifted program just because there was a dual designation -- the second designation usually being learning disabled or emotionally disturbed.

Needless to say, those were some of the most amazing and difficult and wonderful kids I ever worked with.

Oops -- sorry, I forgot the original question.

A T M, much depends on the laws of the state for any particular case, of course.

This website may help http://www.wrightslaw.com/
... particularly this page: http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/advo.index.htm

This is also a good resource. (Some info is outdated, though) Scroll down for some state-specific help. http://rsaffran.tripod.com/legal.html

ATM...

I'm not trying to have a go.  Honestly.  But there's no way to word this that doesn't *sound* like a go is being had.  Sorry in advance...

Is this connected to your idea that autistic people are a spiritually and intellectually superior master race, that autistic children should be protected from socialisation, force-fed mathematics and groomed as prophets, and that autistic people are the victim of a massive genocidal conspiracy?

In case they are the child's teacher's they could just concentrate in that individual child's needs at school.

Now, combining the gifted program and special ed program is a really good idea.  I go to a gifted school and honestly most of us are really, really damn weird as well as smart.  I've heard stories of people coming to their first period class, then wandering off to the school washroom to shave and brush their teeth (I think this kid intends to become a surgeon, which is just a teeny bit worrying...)  There was also one kid who took apart half the chairs in the math room and put them back together during calculus class because he couldn't absorb the information unless he was doing something.  I'm pretty sure 'gifted' is in the same category as learning disabilities where I live.

Some point in my elementary school career I got labeled as 'complex' which in my case meant 'wildly brilliant but also breaks down at unpredictable times, doesn't interact with peers and eats school supplies a lot.'  Academically there was no way they could justify knocking me down a level because, academically, there was nothing I couldn't handle and in a lot of ways I was way more mature than my peers.  I just didn't care for them much.

My IEP became irrelevant just after they started actually showing it to me; at this point its only real function is to give me extra time on tests completely unrelated to my deficits, which is stupid but saved me from failing that one math test the entire class failed.  Then I had an interesting discussion with a classmate that started with 'So I hear you have some super-awesome learning disability' (when was the last time you heard that sentence?) and rapidly branched into 'So you're saying you get extra time on math tests because you have weak social skills?' to which I had to satisfactory reply.

LOL! This gets my vote for AFF Quote of the Week.

ATM: Ma'am, I do not believe that Autistics are a master race.  

Thank you.

All the best.