Residential Options, Advice Needed!

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I have a typical Aspie son who is quite intelligent but has some mild to moderate behavior issues that he needs to work on in a more intensive environment. He has gone to 2 schools that specialize in HFASD but has been a bit too disruptive. He is not violent, generally just inappropriate. We are looking for residential treatment options. Some places I have considered are:

Elevations
Telos Academy
Heritage
Logan River

I live in LA but most of these schools seem to be in Utah for some reason.

After talking to the owner of Logan River I found this site: shutdownloganriver.(dot com)

I was initially excited about Logan River but reading these serious criticisms gave me significant pause about my ability to effectively research any options without independent input.

Does anyone here have experience in this area? Any personal knowledge of the options available? Any resources for independent evaluation of these types of institutions?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Kolin

Hi.

I don't know how many posters are knowledgeable about residential settings. So you may have to hang in there a bit to get someone to post who has that specific knowledge.

I am going to ask a few questions just to clarify a few points which might help people down the line give you advice.

How old is your son chronologically? How old he is emotionally? What were his issues in school? What are his specific challenges at home, and why do you think residential placement would be best?

I ask because typically people on the spectrum do not like change and residential placement would be a very big change away from the people he trusts. I am not saying it is the wrong call, but I am wondering if some type of home-based help might be better b/c it would be less disruptive.

if the issue is that you are having trouble getting the schools to be consistent with what you do at home, and you think that is affecting his progress, there may be other solutions available to you. Many of us have struggled with various school environments and there may be ways to get the schools to be more accommodating, if that is the issue.

Edited for syntax.

Thanks for your clarification request.

My son is 15, but perhaps 8-10 emotionally. He has generally done reasonably well at school, academically and behaviorally. He has had some problems with impulse control (talking about inappropriate subjects and generally confusing and freaking people out, minor inappropriate touching of girls), in school, and has had a number of violent outbursts at home. The most recent caused us to call the police and put him on a 5150 after he attacked stepmom and one of his brothers. It has come to the point where living at home is not working and my professional advisers are recommending residential placement. He is not inherently adverse to this option, as I have told him positive stories of my own boarding school experiences.

Thanks!

In your first post you said he is not violent, but in your next, you said he had violent outbursts and attacked family members. Well, which is it?

If you have to choose a residential placement, it would seem better to have one closer to home to allow visits.

Whatever choice is made, it must be HIS choice. Please take that piece of advice to heart, as I have yet to find a poster in this forum who had been placed in residential treatment who considered it a positive thing. There are current members who have chosen to live in group or treatment settings, and that seems to be a very different experience.

Let him ask the questions he needs to ask, and be involved in the research and discussion. It is HIS life. Despite the fact that he is emotionally immature, there are many ways that he is likely to understand his own needs much better than anyone around him can. He can't thrive in a place where he isn't comfortable, it is as basic as that. If anything about the place bothers him or sets him off, he will regress.

Be sure to visit any place you are considering together before making a decision. And if a place doesn't think your son should be involved in the decision, take it off the list.

I know you are not likely to hear the same from professionals, but I have been involved with this forum and with ASD long enough to feel that having your child on board is ESSENTIAL. ASD kids think differently, remember; they don't respond well to dictates. They DO respond well to suggestions that make logical sense to them. My son was involved in every decision made about his schooling and treatment, a step that made sure he was always fully invested in doing his best and reaching the best outcome. He knew all of us were part of the team, not something he needed to fight. He is off at college now and by all counts a success story, but there were some really rough years in there; growing up ASD isn't easy.

Thanks for the informed responses. I apologize for the confusion about his outbursts. I should have clarified that he has never been violent in public, just in the home setting. In school he is generally compliant.

I fully intend to include him in the process. I will definitely visit all of the possible options and be sure that they are using the least coercive disciplinary practices. I do not take this decision lightly and hope I can find a place he can be happy and learn to find a better balance with the world around him. I just wish there were a better way to evaluate the options. There is so much marketing lingo and misinformation on the web. I want the best for him but the path is not terribly clear.

Whatever you do, you're going to need to be very, very careful. I've heard a lot of horror stories about the type of schools you're considering. On the other hand, I've also seen video of cops shooting a special-needs person while responding to his mother's call. Has your son been violent when he is not at his step-mother's house? If not, then maybe he could stop going there? There is also a book frequently recommended here called "A 5 Is Against the Law!" which is designed to help teens understand social boundaries using a 1-to-5 scale of inappropriateness.

Is the professional team part of court system?

We had a family member who wound up being a ward of the state to get residential treatment for ASD/ADHD. His parents had to sign over their rights because they could not afford it, and our stellar state support system said one more grope/outburst he's going into the jail track for mental health care. At 16, his social skills were below my 11 year old daughter.

He would hold his junk (like rappers do, he never exposed anything) at the high school. Try to grab a girls butt while they were walking between classes. The big issue is he was not low functioning. He passes. At 5' 11", he was pretty imposing. He took his cell phone into the girls restroom, and try to shoot some pictures. He thought it was funny. It wasn't funny when 15 girls swarmed him, and stomped him.

He got his ASD diagnosis, after he got beat up. The issue is, you get more leeway with 6 year old doing stupid crap like that, than a 16 year old teen. Other parents wanted to press charges for the groping/"sexually hostile" environment this teen supposedly created at school.

Between a few police calls to the house by neighbors (I'm guessing similar to your situation), and getting caught sending clothed crotch shots via a web cam to a girl at school, his parents had really no choice. The next big screw up was either a) assault charges/domestic violence or b) sex charges and wind up on the offered list.

I know this doesn't help you, but people dog pile about how horrible someone is when the kid goes into foster care or residential treatment. Most people won't tell you it's the court system holding a gun to their head saying make a choice. How lucky to you feel? Residential treatment care isn't terrific, but either is getting slapped with a domestic violence charge or winding up on the sex offender list. The court system does not care about any of that. If you can tell the difference between an apple and a orange, you are not so mentally ill/developmentally disabled you can't follow the law.

People commented on him fighting at home, but the minor inappropriate touching is a bigger deal for getting into places. There is only one place in my state that will accept kids like that. I'm not talking rape. It's the kids with low impulse control and poor social skills at say sexually not appropriate things, grab a boob or a butt. Do nonsense with the cell phone like my relative. That punts them into a different catagory all together.

My relative died in a car accident at 25, which is the only reason I would even post this. He did get his life together. Left the treatment place at 20, got a job, and was keeping his life on the down low, until a drunk driver cut it short.

Hi KolinJ,

It sounds like you are in a tough situation. I hope you find a way that helps him to live the best life that he can.

I was surprised by your opening sentence, "I have a typical Aspie son..." because there is, almost by definition, no such thing. "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism" is a standard expression of this reality. This frequently observed lack of typicality in aspies and ASD in general may reflect the underlying unique brain patterning observed in recent fMRI studies:
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/01January/P ... terns.aspx

Some of the "residential treatment" places, such as the JRC on the east coast, are superficially barely distinguishable from prison camps with very active torture programs. Closer investigation doesn't help. The infamous Stanford prison experiment showed that the forces that create patterns of abuse are intrinsic to certain situations and most of these programs create those situations.

The question on my mind is why would anyone consider subjecting their child to something anything like that (and the logan river stuff you have uncovered seems unsurprising to me) unless they were in a state of desperation and their child's actions were extreme and represented a danger to themselves and others?

"He is not violent, generally just inappropriate" doesn't seem to reach that level of extremity, so I am confused.

It seems like you are saying two contradictory sets of things. On the one hand, his problems are mild and hardly a problem, on the other, his behavior is so extreme that he can no longer safely live at home and has been rejected as "too disruptive" by two schools specializing in high functioning ASD students.

It's a bit confusing.

You list these problems:
some problems with impulse control: talking about inappropriate subjects
generally confusing and freaking people out
inappropriate touching of girls
violent outbursts at home.
a 5150 after he attacked stepmom and one of his brothers

Google tells me that a 5150 is Californian for "involuntary psychiatric hold." In other words, he was so violent that you had to call the police and have him involuntarily placed in a psych ward.

This odd mix of words makes me wonder things that I am reluctant to speculate about for fear of hurting your feelings. It is confusing, though. You've said the difference in your descriptions is due to his different behavior at home and in the world, but the detail that he was too disruptive for ASD specialty schools seems to indicate otherwise. Can you be a bit more clear about his behavioral challenges and what is going on at home that leads to these outbursts of violence?

Please forgive me if these questions seem to challenging or insensitive--I am trying to get a clear understanding of what his situation is and what might work best to help him and you find your ways in life.

OP, I skimmed the site you posted that wants that Logan River shut down and based on what I skimmed through I learned there I can't imagine that could be a good place. Even if only a small percent is true, it is very bad. If I am understanding wht I read (but do not know for a fact to be true) it seems Utah has very low licensing requirements and that is why they have so many of these types of facilities. I think that is one of the first thing I would vwerify. What standards and oversight do these places have to follow, and how frequently thoroughly are they checked on?

The other thing I saw as that apparently this is a place where they warehouse kids with diverse issues. Some of them are ordered there by court systems, and are treated like a substitute of prison, like Tawaki was saying. Are are the places on your list like that. Is every place like that? As a general question, not just not to the OP, are there no places that are designed for people on the spectrum that are focused on help as opposed to punishment/discipline? I am also curious as to what kind of professional would recommend that Logan place, and I would not trust input from this person.

Based on the additional information, I am guessing that the proposed placement is designed to keep other family safe, and possibly to keep him out of the criminal system.

I am just really disgusted with the lack of options for the OP.

Yup. That's why so many aspies end up home-schooled and then tucked away in their parents' basement. The world criminalizes every misstep they make as they get older, and there's just not a whole lot of safe places for them.

I wish I had more to offer, but wanted to post and say that I am sorry to read about your difficulties and I hope a solution can be found.

I want to second YippySkippy's recommendation of "A Five Is Against the Law," it is a helpful book for young people on the spectrum because it puts into clear language many of the unstated rules that your son seems to be struggling with in public.

The one thing I might recommend is contacting the police and/or fire department that serves the area around the facility: if you can find someone who will talk to you about their general impression (there are legal privacy issues so you may get nothing other than a "feeling") they may give you a better idea than what you can find online. You can also ask the department to "run calls for service," or give you a list of how often 911 was called within the facility or by a community member.

The calls for service log unfortunately will not tell you the reason for the call - it could be something that has nothing to do with the facility, for instance a student with a chronic, life-threatening condition like severe asthma - but it will give you something concrete to take to the school and ask about.

I also want to recommend reading through the posts stickied at the top of the board: I don't think we have any about residential facilities, but we do have a lot of general knowledge collected there that may help you.

I agree that our system of helping ANY individual who has reached the point of police intervention sucks, and I hope you and your son find the help you need. Please keep us posted if you do find a resource that works for you.

Have you tried meeting with an educational consultant? Their whole job is to find the right setting for your kid, and they often work with families of kids who have been expelled from other places, have specific learning/ behavior needs, etc. I know that there are therapeutic boarding schools with good reputations that serve both Aspergers and behavioral challenges.

Two I found were: The Devereux Glenholme School, Washington, CT., and Little Keswick, Keswick, VA. These are not lock down places for "troubled teens", but are regular boarding schools that focus on social/ emotional/ behavior needs.

But, an educational consultant would have the real lowdown (or access to it) for many options where your kid can be happy and safe, while learning boundaries.

Wow, Fitzi, I had no idea such a thing existed! Where does one find an educational consultant? I think there are many, many people here who would benefit from one. (ETA: not having a good communication day - I meant what was written genuinely; I'm worried now that it might seem snarky which is NOT my intention.)

I second those sentiments. I had not been aware of this specialty.

This seems to belong in the category of things that people don't want to think about unless they have to.

Tawaki's post, no matter how different the situation of the OP may be, helped me to understand the bigger picture around this.

I just googled "educational consultant" and a whole bunch of names/ businesses popped up, but I know people who have used them and heard of them from word of mouth. I know a mom who used one to help advise her on helping her kid fill out applications for some of the elite public high schools here, other people use them to help guide them through the applying to college process, one mom I know used one to help her special needs twins find the right therapeutic preschools, and I knew kids growing up whose parents used them cuz their kids kept getting kicked out of school.

Often, the consultant has a relationship with school directors and can also advocate for the kid. They have ones specific to college, prep/ boarding schools, special needs, behavior issues, etc.

I did not read your comment as snarky, I usually assume people are not being sarcastic on this forum .