A couple follow up points for clarification...

A small point of clarification…

I thank all of you for your words of encouragement and for your joining me in this celebration. But I cannot take credit for this. In truth, I have done very little with my boy that has led him to improve in his communication and interaction. The credit for this rest squarely upon my wife’s shoulders. It is she who has worked with him day after day, patiently encouraging him to emerge. It is she who has shuttled him back and forth to therapy sessions week after week after week. It is she who has slogged thru dense special ed textbooks that I have found at yard sales and flea markets. She is the one who has exacted this miracle that nearly every single “expert” in sped or autism has told us could not be had.

I thank you for your words directed at me, but I cannot accept them. My role in all of this has been over-seer. I find information on the Net that may or may not have one single useful word, and then hand her the printouts to make sense of it all. I talk to parents and other interested parties, and then report back. My role in this is more analogous to Administrator, which makes me at once stupid, misguided, and functionally useless to the process.

A quick side bar to this (from another board):

Sandy, you tell me not to blame the teacher in this. I will say to you this, I most certainly do blame this teacher.

When my boy started in the preschool program at a different school than my local one, he couldn’t wait to go. When my older children would go to the bus stop at 8, my boy would be wanting to go with them, tho his bus didn’t pick him up till 8:45. When my wife would take him down finally, he would race for the bus when it pulled up, eager to get to school. This all changed when he entered the K-5 program at my local school.

This is the teacher who took a child who loved school, and in 3 short months turned him into a child you had to force on the bus. By mid-October ’99 he would fight going to school, and his other behaviors at home also were regressing. This is before we ever thought of homeschooling, or trying any other interventions. As this was a gradual process, we did not really notice at first, and it wasn’t until we had pulled him and had the chance to heal this damage that it became obvious what had occurred.

This is the teacher, who at a “meet the teacher” event hosted by our PTO bragged before my wife and I, as well as three other parents that she didn’t bother with IEP’s and saw no use for them. I explained that these were performance contracts, and that they were important to limit the liability the district would face in malpractice proceedings. Still she went on, describing what they had worked on that week, and my wife and I became very uneasy as we each realized that nothing she was recounting had anything to offer my non-verbal son. She spoke of how just that day she had gone over how September was the 9th month, and I thought to myself “my boy has no idea what “9” means, much less that September is the 9th month on our calendar.

This is the teacher who in the only ARD meeting we had contributed nothing during the hour and a half we bickered (and that meeting was for me the revelation that this school system was less than appropriate for my boy). I take that back, she did offer one gem of advice from her experience in special ed. After I had bantered with the principal and counselor for over an hour, the principal cued her, giving her the chance to add her 2 cents. She said that what she saw was that my wife did not discipline my boy properly, and what he needed was for her (my wife) to give him a good spanking when he “misbehaved”. I am blessed with a very quick mind, and I most often do my best thinking when I am on the spot so to speak. I looked at this woman, this special ed teacher whose degree was not behavioral science or abnormal psychology but rather physical education, and calmly asked her if she would have me beat a blind child for not watching where he was walking. She had nothing else to contribute to this meeting.

The decision my wife and I made to pull my boy from this woman’s class took about 2 seconds after I related this to my wife when I got home. We used the excuse of the first round of chelation for lead exposure as the reason for his not going back, and there was no looking back from that time on.

This is the teacher who had some mysterious episode that no one will talk about that caused the special ed room to be moved from the upper floor of the school near the library to a room immediately next to the office. A mysterious episode that no precludes her from ever closing her door, the only teacher, sped or otherwise in my county with this restriction, despite the fact that occasionally one of her kids will sneak out and wander the hallways. This is the woman who now has had child abuse charges filed against her with the State DOE, and potentially criminal charges as well.

Blame this teacher? You bet yer ass I blame this teacher. She’s fortunate that I have restrained my wife on a couple of occasions from cleaning her clock but good (I think my wife could take her without the additional adrenaline that the maternal drive to protect the chicks will bring). I fear that an assault and battery charge against my wife would serve to bring CPS down on us, and so I continue to counsel my wife to stay on the high ground.

Yes, Sandy, I blame this teacher for the actions that occurred to my boy, a beautiful red headed cherub who has an extremely engaging personality, a child who many cannot believe is autistic until the other behaviors, the stims, the repetitive actions, the lack of eye contact are noted. A child who went from delighted student to a temperamental child who will still two years later fight to keep from being led into that school building in just 3 short months. A child who took almost a year to bring back to the point he was before we handed him over to this teacher.

Yes Sandy, I blame her.