Homeschooling Here I Come (I guess)

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All very good thoughts, Thank you!

I am going to have to think about this hard. I am hoping things settle out the rest of the week so I can clear my head,

Thank you.

Update:

They have been sending him home, and the predictable thing has happened. His behavior is getting worse because they are rewarding him by sending him home, So now they are calling in a behavioral expert and we will end up in ARD again, probably.

So for anyone who has been up this particular path, what is a "good" behavioral assessment? We have had them before, but that was before he started acting like this. I think he mainly wants to get sent home with the side benefit for class clown credit along the way. He does not understand that this is not good attention and at this point would not even care. I don't even know if we are going to make it to the end of the year without me pulling him out.

We can't afford an advocate, unless anyone knows a good place to start looking for maybe a free phone consult or something like that.

They take him in a "calming" area where they ignore him. He is in direct sight of an area with too much stimulation. There is too little (read none) stimulation in there, where he is, so he tried to escape and go back to class so that he can "entertain" everyone with his antics. While he is there, he tries to provoke whoever is watching him because the whole thing is he craves attention. They have been instructed not speak to him, (trying to get him to sop attention seeking, which infuriates him. He is also violent, now. Oh, yey, so it is very hard to defend him (read impossible) in any way.

Things were going really well this year until things got disrupted by the sub and now he is unmanageable. He has also started bringing these behaviors home, to see how we handle them. (double, yey!) I am not worried about being able to extinguish them (at least not yet) once he is out of school, but I am very frustrated. it is not the teacher's fault at all. She has tried her best. It started when he had to be removed from class for disruptions, and has gotten worse from there. Now of course that it has escalated, he is behaving worse in class, and she really can't control him.

My understanding is that once the behavioralist comes in this will get worse because they don't really know what they are doing and have very rigid protocols.

When we had DS in treatment, the thing that helped us most with his behavior was the FBA - Functional Behavior Assessment. It's a piece of ABA - essentially, it is a behavior chart that tracks the antecedents and consequences of problem behavior. Essentially, it's a tool to figure out what the behaviors are trying to communicate, and whether the behavior produces a desired result for the child.

Without this tool, we would not have connected the dots between DS's extreme rigidity, his pragmatics deficit, and his outbursts at school. I know that sounds like Asperger's 101, but the outbursts seemed so inexplicable at the time - he'd be going along just fine and then suddenly explode. I think any good behaviorist is going to start with a tool like this that gets to the why of it, and if not, you have a problem.

Here's some stuff on FBA http://www.pbisworld.com/tier-2/functio ... sment-fba/ and here http://mfba.net/forms.html

Good luck!

ASDmommyASDkid - I can pm you a copy of the functional behavior assessment and behavior intervention plan that our school developed for DS this year. The difference in his behavior has been night and day since this has been done. Let em know if you'd like to see it.

Thank, Bombaloo. I sent a pm your way.

Thank you too, Momsparky.

I was homeschooled - now I'm in university as an undergraduate psych student.

One thing to keep in mind is that you don't need to demonstrate what curriculum you've been using. If he can pass the SAT, that counts as the equivalent of a high school diploma when it comes to applying to university. In my case, because of my demand avoidance, we ended up reinventing 'unschooling' and as a result I had absolutely no documentation whatsoever of what I'd learnt. But the university arranged for me to sit the SAT (even though it's not normally used in my country) and I aced it, so they let me in.

I don't have any advice, but I just wanted to say that I can relate to this. All my instincts are telling me I should homeschool my son instead of enrolling him in Kindergarten this Fall, but I'm afraid I'm going to fail at homeschooling him. I'm currently working on setting up an IEP before he starts, but the feeling I'm getting is bad already. The one year of preschool has not gone well. Good luck with your decision.

Thank you all so much for your help. I don't know what I would do otherwise. I am going to go on and have them do a real FBA, and proceed from there. We may very well decide to home school him, anyway, if they can't resolve this, as I need to contain the damage to him done by their mishandling him. But I am going to at least try to see if this is fixable before I give up.

Thank you all.

Today was even more terrible. I had an impromptu conference with the school. The educational diagnostician was there and basically told me it has nothing to do with autism and that he was being oppositional defiant for the sake of control. I told her that I felt that it was caused by all the disruptions and lacking of training the school had, as well as the multiple failed interventions that made things worse b/c the district had not properly prepared the school. I asked for a real FBA, and I guess we will see what happens. If the FBA just says he is ODD I am going to be pretty upset. If he is ODD there I still think it is b/c they caused it with their incompetence. He has never been compliant, in an NT sense, but he is not even acting that way at home unless it after a horrible day there. Even then, he cools down and is his usual intermittently compliant self.


I think he has something like PTSD when he enters that place, and he wants control to feel safe. I also think he wants attention and he is playing social scientist with them to see what they will do. It is not good but that does not make him ODD, right?

Put it this way: what if he is ODD? I'm not in any way saying that you're wrong - the point I'm trying to make is that ODD doesn't change a thing for the school. They still have to provide FAPE, no matter what collection of initials they stick on his report.

Incidentally, you might remind them: protocol for ODD is a good FBA and a lot of the same things that an autistic student needs - take a look: http://specialed.about.com/od/behaviore ... sorder.htm (note that structure/routines are indicated.) They can't use ODD as an excuse for mishandling your child.

Don't let them off the hook even if you do decide to homeschool. Somebody needs to show them that blaming the child is wildly inappropriate.

Thanks, Momsparky!

Yeah, that is true, it is just another set of initials. I think my alarm bells went of b/c among other things the diagnostician said that 95% of what he was doing was not autism and was b/c he was oppositional/defiant. I had the feeling that the next step would be to say it is not b/c of his disability. But you are right, ODD is a disability, too, which makes me wonder if they are going to say oppositional defiant without adding the "disorder" part.

The only thing that is good (maybe) is that she does not think sending him home is a good idea, so maybe they will stop sending him home. Of course that could mean that they might try to fight the homeschooling, although the principal would be overjoyed if we went that route. I am going to try not to worry, and deal with what happens each day until they complete the FBA.

This was a good post somebody posted a while back, sounds like they are trying some of these on you:

http://nichcy.org/top-10-most-ridiculous-comments

I hope they have someone competent to conduct the FBA. I was VERY leery of this process at first because everything the school had tried prior to this was pretty much a complete failure. Fortunately for us our district does have a good specialist who came in and did the FBA and helped develop the behavior plan. Kindergarten was a total disaster in my opinion but 1st grade has been so much better now that these supports are in place.

Time4Learning is cheap and really good....

Also, there is a private/home school instruction place here where you can go to school for the full amount of required courses (which are half a day) and they are very accommodating to all sorts of kids, disability or not.... the kids learn at their own pace and are put into groups by their ability, not age... they have classes up through advanced placement/ college coursework but also have a good basic program for kids who are not looking to go to college.... and class size is very small, like 10....I only stumbled on it by mistake because I was looking for an afterschool tutor... you might try searching in your area for "learning center" or "tutoring"... it would definitely have to be budgeted for (but less than most traditional private schools) but you could also just take 1 or 2 classes...

As far as homeschool programs, you can always explore the options here for any subject since there are plenty of homeschoolers here, and I have been able to find several programs on ebay as long as I begin looking far enough ahead of the time I need them... and you can sell them when you are done...

Thanks, Kcal!

I know of a few people who homeschool their ASD kids, using everything from a structured curriculum to natural learning to rad unschooling. I think if you go this way, as long as you are doing something that responds to your child's needs, it can be very successful.

We have decided to go with a waldorfy unschooling mashup, my eldest is 11 and is schooled (her dad insists), but the two younger ones are four (NT) and three (ASD) and we are free ranging atm. We also have a good local homeschooling community around us, which makes things much easier!