Symptoms Decreased?

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wow. how depressing and sad. not that a child may remain in school til 21 and be on ssi, but that you advocate to parents to assume this is how its going to be. autism is not a death sentence, its not automatic doom to a life of poverty living on ssi. it doesnt mean you cant pursue dreams or have loftier goals.

if i were one of those parents, i would have without a doubt told you, in my tactful NT way, to go screw yourself. that i am not going to give up on my child and assume the barest of existences for him. that i will not let HIM give up on himself and settle for less than he is deserving of. i will not teach him through MY actions that he is capable of less. he deserves to have goals and dreams and all the support that i can give or get others to give to help him achieve those.




it is the schools job to offer the opportunity to be academically ready for college. it is our job, as parents, to make sure our children take that opportunity. it is our job to make sure they are psychologically and emotionally ready for college. that our children cant get and retain employment or succeed in dating is not a failure of the public school system. the systems job is to be sure our children meet the mandated minimums for education, not to be successful adults. they teach the basic academics, they do not teach how to apply those academics to the real world.

it is indisputable that some of our children will take longer to get through school. some will never go to college, or even if they do, not hold down a job. some will fail at personal relationships and remain romantically unattached. this is true for every child, asd or not. there is no way for us to tell now whether these things will happen later. some parents may see getting ready for those things as being prepared, i see it as accepting failure before it happens.

as for homeschooling, none of my children will ever be homeschooled. while some parents do great with it, and for some kids its definitely the best option, neither me nor my SO have the temperament/personality to make it a feasible option. for my kids, my asd son would probably do fine with it, my oldest would die the first week (one of us parents would undoubtedly kill him), and my social butterfly middle son would wither away and die if not surrounded every day by hundreds of other children his age. but for other families, do what works best.

No, it won't. Canada does not have States. Something I guess your public school didn't teach you. Snarkiness fully intended.



Please show me the statistics that support your statement.



I thought you just said it DID make a difference - you just said that homeschooling made them less likely to find meaningful employment. But in your very next sentence you say there is no difference. I don't think I'm the one who doesn't agree with the stats, you appear to be the one who doesn't understand the stats. They either fare worse or the same in your opinion, which is it?

Even if your statistics are accurate and from a reputable source, then what you are saying is that PS can make a child grow up to be miserable, while homeschooling can make a child happier, and they both have the same statistical employability rate. I'll take the happiness option any day - and you can bet my son would too.



What an awful thing to have happen to your daughter. And how brave she was to re-enter the system. However, it has nothing to do with the discussion of homeschooling. If anything, it makes me wonder what kind of homeschooling you were doing if you continue to hold outdated concepts of children "not being in the real world" when they are homeschooled. Perhaps your experience was profoundly different than the vast majority, because surely you were in a situation where you felt the need to protect and shelter your daughter after such a violent incident. That is not indicative of the general homeschooling situation.

As I explained in my last comment, my son gained FAR GREATER real world social exposure during our year of homeschooling than he ever did in public school, and moreover, he learned how to not just cope, but enjoy that exposure. THOSE skills will pay dividends when seeking and maintaining meaninful employment.



What does any of that have to do with homeschooling?



Oh what a bunch of baloney. You don't know the first thing about what the posters here have been through to fight for their children. Shame on you for making such an ignorant and unfounded presumption. Perhaps being a fan of education, you would like to ASK them what kind of fighting they have done, before you assume they are a bunch of cowards. My MLA, MP, Minister of Education and Minister of Health AND the Premier of my province all likely know my name by now because of the battles I've fought for my son.

The thing with battles is that you win some and you lose some. The thing with children, is that you do whatever it takes to WIN even if it means removing him from the battlefield to save his life.

Thank you for this DW, this is such an important thing for parents to understand and something I hadn't even really thought about yet as my son is only 7. But what a crucial point - so much of how we measure success and failure is based exclusively on expectations. Modify the expectations and you can actually create success.

The information was part of a policy statement that DofE sent out several years ago which caused a firestorm among the teachers representatives who could not accept that it was so high. And it is NOT an 85 to 89% unemployment rate. The stat was about AS/HFAs who were not able to find substantial, meaningful employment that enabled them to live independently and be self supporting and contributing members of society. It included the veritable army of underemployed, who collect shopping carts in the parking lots, stock shelves and work part time at McDonalds at minimum wage, while collecting SSI, etc.

Are you serious? Because you couldn't find something on the internet, it is made up? The President promised 'transparency' and his website told millions of Americans that legislation would be posted on the web before it was voted upon to give us the ability to see what was going on in Washington. Do you have a copy of that promise? Does the fact that it was removed from the website mean it never happened and to make mention of it is fear mongering? Give me a break.

I was shown the statement by a politician at a legislative breakfast during a discussion about the failure of the PS system to service this population. She pulled it out of her briefcase, it was passed around the table and it went back into her bag. We were not provided copies. It must have had wider distribution than that, because I saw the same figures being attacked in a newspaper OpEd piece by a lobbyist for a teacher's organization several months later. They were livid that someone would impugn the teaching profession by suggesting that they were responsible for a failure rate that was almost 90%. (They accept that 75% of America's inner-city youth don't graduate, but rail at 15% success when dealing with HFA/AS.)

Tracker, you are totally right - 89% failure rate, or even 85% is ridiculous. So is a situation where there has been little improvement, despite massive amounts of money being thrown at the problem. Worse, yet, is when it is acknowledged that the system is broken and people choose to quibble about how far the decay has grown instead of trying to do what is really necessary to fix it.

I understand the need to escape the morass, but it should be temporary (for all of the reasons given earlier) - until the system is no longer abusive and the district will provide services to meet the individual needs of the student and the child can handle it. Empower your children by seeing that the PS system provides them with skills they need or force them to find and pay for a placement which can - using the material in my first post in this string.

IDEA entitles every child to a Free, Appropriate Public Education that meets their Individual Needs in the Least Restrictive Environment. It is the law and the schools must comply with it. If they are failing, your child is being deprived of their rights and discriminated against because of their disability/handicap. That provides you with some very heavy allies to help open that box and drag the system into the 21st century.

EduTracker -You still cannot and I guess won't acknowledge, at least, that some of us don't WANT our kids in the system because for my son the least restrictive environment is at home and that homeschooling is a viable and valid choice. I try really hard not to too far over the top with my anti-public school mindset because I know ps is on option just as much as homeschooling is...to each his own right?l.....but your posts sure are making it difficult.

My apologies to Jillysue for going totally off-track with this thread, but despite what I feel is a useless public school v. homeschool debate (can we drop that now? It's parent's choice, end of story) this whole business about being ready to enter the workforce is important.

I would suggest, EduAvocate, that the issue isn't in the educational system at all. It is in the complete lack of transitional school to adult life systems, support for education beyond age 18, and appropriate support for for young adult AS as they spend their early adult years trying, in essence, to finish growing up and catch up with educational deficits and life skills. It has actually come up on this board, and it sparked my interest enough for me once to suggest we take it on as a board project, but when it came right down to it we didn't have the momentum to make that happen.

I've seen young adults post here on the complete void of services that happens once they hit 18. All the money and programs stop. End of the line.

But they haven't reached their developmental peak in any way, shape or form. Society stops working on education and development and moves into what is essentially a warehouse phase. That is inappropriate and costs society more in the long run than is needed. Were society, instead, to see them as "children" until, say, 25, maybe there would be a different result.

But is doesn't.

That is where I think the advocacy needs to be made, in programs designed to help AS ages 18-25 develop their gifts while continuing to support some basic life skills that they remain unready for. To do for them, in a way, what you would do for a teenager facing challenges. They just are not done, they aren't finished yet, but we do the practical equivalent of kicking them out of high school after freshman year.

There is plenty of proof on these boards of the many, many ways AS can be "late bloomers" or have "late starts." But they are left to figure that out on their own starting from a time they are not usually emotionally or developmentally ready. The average age of marriage is later; the average career peak is later. EVERYTHING seems to be later. So why are they stuck in a system that calls 18 "adult?"

This is your issue, EduAvocate. You've got drive, you want to make a difference. Adjust the target a little; what can we do?

not a useless debate at all - if a lot of misinformation about homeschooling (and there is a lot on this thread and in the real world) can be debunked and replaced with the facts...then it's worth it.

I guess I feel that question was long, long ago settled on this board: ie, homeschooling is a viable and important option and that there are many ways to fill in the gaps on the social skills, and that few feel they actually acquired any useful social skills attending middle or high school.

I don't spend that much time here reading the posts about young adult life issues, so I may not have the summary correct in my head, but it is my understanding that what is lacking is APPROPRIATE services. Those who have looked for help have tended to find the wrong help and the wrong options. As if what they can do today is what they can do tomorrow, instead of realizing that tomorrow new developmental readiness with have been acquired.

Always being behind the curve developmentally basically means that the schools are always asking too much in the way of organizational skills and independence. Hence, an IEP to allow some extra support. But at some point the assumption starts that the skill is lacking, not just late, and the opportunities to learn it in a gradual and normal way are gone. My son learned to tie his shoes and ride a bike four years late, but he did learn to do both, and he became proficient at both. With a school system that is always paced a few years ahead on the life skills, the lessons are never timed right. It's not as is they get to go back and learn the life skills from seventh grade when they hit senior year; that shipped sailed, and the program is too busy trying to fill the gap between seventh grade maturity and senior year expectation to sit down and give seventh grade level practice and teaching for the one skill that that the person is now developmentally ready for. As a parent, I have to see that and fill it in; with each IEP student on his own unique timeline, and dozens of little skills are involved; the schools cannot be expected to adapt to each child at that level and fill in the gaps.

Transition services at 16 aren't much help when the person receiving them actually will be developmentally ready for them at 23. It's seven full years too early and, thus, a lost effort.

And I absolutely don't want to hold kids like my mine back for the life skills development; he needs to follow his intellect which is, ultimately, what schooling is about: information, intellect, thought formation. That is all very well on schedule, if not in front of it.

I don't think the school system is the answer I'm looking for, and I don't think SSI - which I see as a maintenance payment, not educational support - is right, either.