Autistic student jumps in front of tram after cancelled school trip
June 25, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
17-year-old Jonathon Howarth was so disappointed about a cancelled school trip that he walked out of his college and jumped in front of a tram in Manchester city centre. Howarth had autism; as reported in the Mirror:
His mum, Joanne Howies, 36, from Dukinfield, Manchester, said: “I just feel numb. When the police said he had jumped in front of a tram I said: ‘He wouldn’t do that’. But something so trivial to us, to someone with autism is devastating.
Thinking very much of Jonathon and his family, and I’m remember his mother’s words.
This is very sad.
I hope that the college, for its part, uses this as a springboard to talk about ways that they can better accommodate those with developmental differences in the future, rather than use this incident as justification for excluding those who are different.
Joe
How do you accommodate for a cancelled event?
I do realize accommodations matter: I spent most of a semester fighting my university, where I both teach two courses and am preparing to defend my Ph.D work.
However, physical accommodations (I have seizures with some lights / electronic “buzz” sounds), are a lot easier than dealing with than the situation in this story.
I have had students walk out of rooms and even hit other students. The safety of the group is my responsibility, even if that means I can’t address the needs of an ASD student. I can’t chase after a student, leaving other students in a lab unsupervised. (I have made the choice, once, to rush after a young lady. Right choice, in my mind, but I was verbally reprimanded for not calling security instead.)
Instructors at all levels face tough, tough choices. I’m painfully aware of how hard those can be, both as an ASD individual and as an instructor.
I’m sure I’ve made choices that “favored” the disabled, and I’m sure I’ve been accused of not doing enough. Our local theme park (Valleyfaire) has special access rules for autistic students because of the meltdown issues. They don’t have special access (quick queue) for physically disabled… waiting is waiting, the courts ruled. But, autistic meltdowns were a serious concern.
My one question: What does this do to the public image of autism? We aren’t all about to meltdown and rush into roller coasters or trams. Nor will we run about airplanes during takeoff.
But, people are going to start fearing us. Uhg.
I have not had any students having a “meltdown” in class—Jim has a colleague who had a student on the spectrum in the class, and this (a meltdown) did happen. His colleague mentioned it to him (Jim also had the same student in his own class).
I’d hope that this could point to the need for more training and understanding about special needs students in college. I know that’s an optimistic statement, but (as you know too well) there’s too much of a sense of, they’re older, they should try to handle things themselves.
I fear meltdowns, even as we do everything in our power to teach Amigo how to avoid them and handle them. This is a frightening story.
Seems to be a grand assumption that the cancelled trip is at the bottom of this. Why is that so certain? It surely absolves a lot of folks from having anything to do with it -and that may be right. But before we do something that yet again places all the onus on the autistic for being autistic – and think what that leads to, we should be checking carefully. After all, folks are going to get the idea that autistics will top themselves over nothing really and that is surely wrong.
@C.S.Wyatt,
Looking at my response, I guess I was not clear.
I am not blaming the school or the instructor for what happened. But what I don’t want to see happen is for school administrators to look at this incident and say “Wow. That turned out really badly. We really could be putting ourself at increased liability for admitting autistics. Guess we shouldn’t let them into our school anymore”.
Rather I would like to have them look at this and see if they can determine if there were any other antecedent events that might have tripped this off (either in school or out of school), try to determine if there were signs that he was decompensating before this happened (when some intervention might have helped prevent it from escalating), and take a look at their autism training of teachers and staff to see whether it is adequate. Again, not to place blame, but to try to better accommodate people in the future. As this person was only 17 years old, perhaps he had a full time aide when he was in high school, but didn’t have one now. I don’t know the specific circumstances here. But perhaps there should have been some evaluation before the term started to determine whether he should have an aide for a certain period of time while he was becoming adjusted to college life. As this was college, if they decided he would benefit from an aide, perhaps that person could have been provided by the student/his family themselves. Some colleges offer peer “buddies” to help ASD students make the adjustment to college.
I don’t know what the answer in this case is, I just think that the situation deserves to be looked at a bit, and not just have a knee jerk reaction that will limit future autistics access to this (and other) colleges.
Joe
Anything can happen during a meltdown though, There have been occasions when I have ended up in the middle of a road, I even once lay down in front of the traffic.
Less than 10 years ago at a certain University (not the one I am studying at now) security were called when I had a meltdown, that was the worst thing to do, because it cut off my line of retreat from a situation I was trying to extricate myself from to prevent it getting worse.
How can you accommodate for a cancelled event?
You cannot, I had to contend with power lines down in Rugby only today, meaning I could not catch the train I had intended to. It was late trains that set the scene for that University meltdown I just mentioned, by the time I had got there, and finding myself in the worst sensory environment possible, I had simply run out of coping strategies.
We don’t know the full story behind this, but maybe there was more the college could have done, I know for a fact that even colleges that boast of there abilities to know how to deal with autistic students, don’t always live up to the advertising hype.
And even places where they most certainly ought to know better, like an autism research centre in a certain Midland University don’t get it right all the time either.
How tragic.
Pete (who was 6 at the time) experienced the cancellation of a field trip this year and mourned that for at least a week. He still talks about it, 5 months later. I think the bottom line is that we just need to try to be prepared for this possibility…I’m not trying to cast blame on anyone in the article, I just think people working with these students need to be aware of what I believe Kristina called (in another post) “cognitive dissonance” — where the event that a person is expecting is changed drastically and the person cannot find a mental balance with that change. My son finds himself in this situation frequently, for much less than a cancelled field trip, and it’s clear the amount of anxiety it causes.
Sometimes I feel we have to practice with Charlie so he can handle these situations. I think they have bothered him more as he has gotten older—when he was 5, he literally saw the door to an airplane close in his face and he handled it ok (better than me, to be honest). But now he’s super-sensitive of what’s going on and when it is going on.
I do think that some schools “overadvertise” their capacity to accommodate autistic students—a lot more than “more time on tests” is needed.
Heartbearking. Things like that really scare me. Sometimes my daughter just does not think about the ramifications of darting in front of a car. I tell anyone who takes her somewhere to watch her like a hawk. I don’t think people realize that something like that could ever happen. But, it does. So sad.
We expect a lot of our schools. Universities, however, are not K-12 settings. Most have small, and shrinking, disability services. Faculty, depending on union contracts and such, can refuse training. Students causing the slightest disruption are violating academic codes.
When I present on being ASD at a university, I have to bluntly tell parents that I have, maybe, four or five faculty on a campus of 50,000 students seek information on autism. We lost our best autism DS specialist this year, so I expect even fewer faculty will be contacted.
The laws regulating universities are not like IDEA. Not even close. I can and have had a professor ask that I not attend her course — I had to complete the course via “distance learning” to meet my degree requirements. The school ruled that as long as I was accommodated, there was no problem. (Sure enough, having been a college administrator, now, I know that’s true.)
Self-advocacy is key, I increasingly believe. Students should speak up. Legally, I can’t comment on anything to a parent in most cases (FERPA) so it is up to the student to be engaged in the battles against ignorance.
I have had other university admins tell me they would rather autistic students stick to online learning. If we said that of the physically disabled, it would be clear discrimination. In the case of autism, it’s “What if the student hurts someone else?”
And yes, I have had a professor say she feared for her physical safety around me. Ignorance is everywhere.
“And yes, I have had a professor say she feared for her physical safety around me. Ignorance is everywhere.”
I know you are not, but you’ve got to be kidding! Argh.
Examination, indeed, is probably good regardless, so no arguments here.
It is difficult, though, to know what to do when dealing with larger situations. For me, it’s been a matter of having to learn adaptation methods individually, which I actually see communicated frequently enough in general. Thing is, it isn’t always quite as clearly communicated as it might be how to construct goals and subsidiary goals, and typically it seems that autistics who didn’t get that line of communication are bouncing from one overarching goal to the next. That’s extremely dangerous, for obvious reasons.
Right now, I have to admit that personally I haven’t really had meltdowns and haven’t for a while. That comes at a cost. I maintain a pretty high threshold for pain and suffering, and come the second half of the year it’s lead to some serious health issues.
I frequently also get the “more time on tests” feeling as to my queries for accommodations, and I think that’s my fault as much as theirs; I present normally enough, and I’ve been raised generally (a less-than-lovely product of the “let’s forget this kid has autism” mentality) to only raise a white flag when I’m really out of my league. As it stands, I am pretty sure that some of my previous professors wouldn’t really care if I was having serious issues (I’ve gotten that message pretty clearly already, actually).
As to this just being out of the blue, though, I somehow doubt it. It might have been heavily predicated on a level of too-immediate construction, but I think, considering where he was and what he was doing, there would be more details, more stress. Hauntingly, I could believe this to be a form of elevated stress leading to suicide. But it’s hard to say for sure, I’d have to know before I could even relatively say one way or the other on that point.
Cliff