should I send my kid to another school?

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My 7-yr old is in a small method school. It's a great school, but very chaotic. Very neo-hippy, lots of group work, very few rules, but a lot of 'agreements' instead.

They ask a lot from kids on a social and emotional level. My son seems to be enjoying himself there, but also gets hyper a lot and overstimulated.He's also gifted, and bored. The educational level is kinda low, he's being understimulated on an intellectual level. They're all about learning by doing, which is great, but it doesn't level with him.
He has Tourette's and he tics a lot when he comes out of school. They also don't follow the IEP like they should. It's clear that they don't really believe in structure and routine, they don't even fill in agendas. They messed up badly a few times, various incidents. So I'm very dissapointed.

The teacher he would get next year, does have experience with ASD kids and seems very willing to do better. Also, he doesn't want to leave. He has two friends there. He says he only wants to switch 'if they come with him'; which of course isn't possible.

I can send him to another school that is experienced with gifted children and have a great program. He would definitely get challenged and actually learn something there. They say they have some other kids on the spectrum there.

But, there's more kids in his classroom, school is bigger and there is a lot less emphasis on group activities and less free play. And, it did feel like our talk had to go very quickly and they weren't really that comfortable with the Tourette's part. The brief talk I had with the principal and the teacher just felt unpersonal, like they weren't really that interested in his 'profile'. That worries me, because you really need to understand his Dxs in order to get his behaviour.

So I got neo-hippie chaotic school vs unpersonal and aloof yet seemingly professional people. He doens't want to switch, but I don't want to leave the decision up to him. He seems to be emotionally fragile at this moment, and a more structured environment seems the logical way to go, but I'm worried the school might be worse. What if he gets bullied? What if he can't get over the change? What if his Tourette's gets worse and the teacher doesn't understand? We are starting therapy, but I need to take a decision about the school problem now. Advice greatly appreciated!

He's happy, he has friends, next year's teacher has ASD experience, and the school isn't trying to get you to leave. I'd say that's worth staying for another year.

I agree with Zette. If your child is thriving socially and the school is accommodating your child's needs, academic enrichment can come at home. I would be very reticent about putting my child somewhere where they were reluctant to deal with his issues.

If they are inflexible, they can make your child's life very unpleasant.

Just my 2 cents.

I wouldn't move my kid from a school where he has friends, no matter how hippy-dippy it is.
Things at the new school could be much, much worse.

It helps if you can get a feel for whether kids seem happy and especially whether differences are tolerated and accepted. Observing if that's permitted helps.

The incidents were pretty bad. He once accidently hung himself while playing on the slides, there was nobody around, I got in just in time. I found knives in the library. They seem to 'not believe' his ASD, talk al lot about 'emotional blockage' and 'not being motivated or mature'. They refuse to use the communication 'methods' I ask them to use, eg when they do group projects, the kids need to figure out themselves what to do. Which leads to my kid never knowing what to do and therefore getting bad scores on group projects, and hating the projects all toghether, which is a problem since it's almost every afternoon. They refuse to give him a clear task, because that's against their philosophy.
After school camp, he broke down and said he didn't want to live anymore. I don't know what happend, but I do know they refused to use the daychart his OT made to get soms kind of structure. They let them sleep in tents quite far from the summer cabin so he stayed up way too late and probably got overloaded. He cried for hours when he came back. This is a school camp incident, I know it's different from actual school, but it illustrates the way they deal with my pleads for structure and clarity. WHich also makes his OCD worse. Sometimes when I pick him up, he insists on going out the way he got in, following the exact same route. He tics like crazy when he gets out. The lack of structure is feeding his OCD and Tourette's, even if he isn't aware of it.

Then again, as people say, other school could be worse. But they won't be trying to cure him with yoga, if you know what I mean. I won't be getting emails like 'we put your son together with 7 other kids in a unsupervised classroom for a couple of hours and are dissapointed that he wasn't working when we stepped in'. The other school has a lot of gifted kids and ASD kids, the new teacher has experience with spectrum kids as well. I was just a bit dissapointed with their seemingly disinterest in his psychiatric profile. Maybe that was a bit too speculative. God, this is hard.

also, there is a shortage of schools. So if I stay, I probably have to stay for the remaining years and I heard the teacher in the year after the next, is not very open to special kids.

If I go, I might be able to go back if it backfires, but there is no guarantee.

and to make it harder, schools are closed now. I read the screening rapport from the ministry of Education, which was excellent. The screening rapport of the hippy-dippies was pretty awful.

Basically, it's choosing between a pretty bad school for Aspies vs a good school on paper. But with the risk of not fitting in anyway.

I had a secret option number three; a special needs school. They said the don't have enough resources to deal with the Tourette part. I can't believe this. I feel like going into the ministry of Education and doing a John Q.

I agree that you have a tough decision. It does not sound like any of the schools want to work with you for the benefit of your son. I am not familiar on how special education works in Belgium. Do you have IEPs or anything else the schools are required to follow?

Are there kids in your neighborhood that go to the new school? Perhaps their parents can recommend other kids in the school at your son's social maturity level. Or perhaps the new school staff can make recommendations. You can approach those parents and see if the kids would like to get together. If your son makes friend(s) this summer with one or more kids at the new school, perhaps you can get permission for them to show him around the week before school restarts in the fall. This summer your son would see friends from both schools, gradually more with the new school. I did this when we moved from the suburbs to the country and it worked well, but was crazy for me because the sitter was from the suburbs and stayed with us for 4 days a week in the country during the summer, so I was constantly driving everyone around.

You would want an more socially mature buddy to teach your son Instrumental Social Skills. Instrumental skills are mainly about getting what you need and about fitting in. Instrumental Skills are applicable to situations in which people typically behave in predictable, scripted ways (eg. Social Stories). But you want kids at your son's same social maturity level to develop Relational Social Skills, the unpredictable dynamic Give and Take, where there are multiple perspectives where they learn there is more than one right way of thinking, feeling, solving a problem and behaving.

The school could assign a kind buddy or two for the transition for the Instrumental Social Skills introduction to the new school.

We had the opportunity to switch my daughter to a school that had a program just for HFA and aspergers kids built into the main stream curriculum. We turned it down. IT busts my buttons because when we started her at her curent school the first words out of my mouth at the very first few IEP meetings were "If there is another school better suited to her needs, please tell US now and make that an option NOW because we won't move her later unless you force us to or unless she is is really miserable here." They assured me that no school was better equipped to handle her...

Two years later she was doing well and had everything she needed when they said, "Oh by they way. There is a school 1 mile away that has this program etc... she might be better off there." I said , "Do you remember what I said about that?" And they said "Yeah BUT we think you'll like it so much you'll move her over there." So I humored them and toured it. Now, had they made this an option when she was still in kindergarten, I would have been all for it. The thing is that NOW she has formed some attachments to people in her school. Teachers, students. Nothing super strong, nothing I would really term a "Friendship" but they're there. The last thing I want to do is to further cement in her mind the UNimportance of attachments to others by breaking all those bonds and plopping her in a brand new and unfamiliar school filled with people she doesn't know and who don't know her. Not only would that set her off kilter in a serious way, but it's going to teach her that bonds with other people are low on the totem pole of importancy. So I have turned it down for now. The door is open though if we need it. The only way I would do it is if she, for whatever reason, became profoundly miserable at her current school.

So no. If he isn't complaining and has a couple of friends, I wouldn't move him.

Friends are very important, but what is most important in a school is how well the adults want to work for what is best for your child.

Kids on the spectrum rarely learn Relational Social Skills by casual interaction with typical peers. They need to start out with a safe trusted adult to teach imitation, joint attention, and other social referencing skills. Then build toward shared responsibility for the relationship and how to repair and maintain relationships. Once they get this, they are ready to build relationships with same social level peers with the gentle coaching of the adult.

Expecting them to learn by chance frequently leads to social burn out and retreat because they forced to do too much they are unprepared for with too little payoff.

To much emphasis is placed on having friends that kids on the spectrum will except "one-way friends" to just have a friend. Too little emphasis is placed on building skills to build relationships which are generalizable to many relationships.

It is not how many friends you have. It is the quality of the relationship that is important.