A full school day in a timeout room?

Hope your child is doing all right now.

thank you.

We could not homeschool Charlie — he likes to go places, and come back home, and then there’s our jobs. It happens that a lot of parents have moved to the town we live in for the reputation of the schools, period. The administrative back and forth that we’ve had to go through, and will no doubt have to again in the future, just seems part of the package—-I’m helped greatly by knowing that our struggle to get Charlie into the educational setting he can thrive in was not the only one.

And yes, I’d rather not be fighting each other, too many other things to attend to!

Yup. And even though I speak, and when I can’t, then I type, even when an articulated verbal explanation is right there in words in front of them, I usually get this kind of reaction too. Much easier to blame a lack of understanding on inherent deficits in me, when I’ve known plenty of NTs who are my age, no training whatever, and they can better understand because they don’t put me through this systemic filter of me being inherently mysterious.

To my mind, these folks can abuse kids and get away with it, and they can do it on MY TAX MONEY, which they use to cover their butts with expensive lawyers when something goes wrong. Perhaps my experiences have made me an extremist? I didn’t start out that way and used to be a regular volunteer, PTA member and the whole bit. Now I have a hard time reconciling the ideas like “some nice people work in public school” and “public schools really do this to real children, including mine.”

Perhaps you are right, and public schools will be here whether I like ‘em or not. They’d better at least know what they’re doing. But I just… can’t… bring… myself to be supportive of them.

I do appreciate parents with the knowledge, time, energy and money who are able to stay and fight, however. Too often we fight amongst ourselves instead of tolerating other viewpoints on what’s best for autistic children.

Kristina, thank you for your blog and your intelligent treatment of issues relating to autism. :]

We were never informed in advance about restraints being used on Charlie in our old school district. It was presented to us as “what you do,” after the fact, and with no sense of how it was supposed to stop behaviors like head-banging. If I’d known then what I know now (famous last words).