Katie had a good three years in the Dublin School District’s autism program. Unfortunately she aged out of that program this summer, and as hard as it was to say goodbye—especially when she had made her first actual friends there—I knew it was time for her to try something new. After exploring the limited options last spring, I reluctantly agreed to transfer Katie back to our school district so she could be in a mixed moderate/severe special day class (SDC) that seemed like a good fit and a big step towards mainstreaming. And to be honest, I think I was at least partially correct in my assessment. The teacher is wonderful, and the school has given Katie a warm welcome. Katie is one of only two autistic children in the classroom, and her social skills and speech have made tremendous gains since the school year began.

But the school district has fallen down on the job more times than I can count at this point. Sensory equipment that they committed to providing in the classroom took 5 weeks to appear. The aide assigned to my daughter had never worked with an autistic child before, and when she threw her back out, they assigned a new aide (read temporary sub) with no training whatsoever. They doubled the number of kids in the classroom—once again the magic number is 13—but didn’t increase the number of aides. On the first day, they put her in the lunch room (and recess!) with the entire school population, rather than allowing her to ease into the new placement in a more gradual manner.

In other words, they threw Katie into the deep end of the pool with almost no support.

Given how terribly the transition was managed, it’s a surprise Katie did as well as she did. Within a few weeks, she was tolerating the various inclusion programs that she had been placed into. (Again, these are great programs, but I would have allowed her to acclimate to her primary classroom before adding additional hurdles.) She survived the challenges of lunchtime and recess. But some of the behavior problems that had necessitated her transfer to the Dublin School District resurfaced. And worse, some new behaviors erupted.

I may be a bit paranoid given our contentious history, but I honestly think the school district set Katie up to fail. Or more likely, it unintentionally set her up to fail due to poor decisions, incompetent management, and placing the district’s financial concerns above the students’ needs. (Moderate/severe SDCs typically have a maximum of 8 students and are staffed at a 2:1 ratio. In other words, each class has up to 8 children, 4 aides, and 1 teacher. The magical number 13 that keeps popping up in this story?—it’s an arbitrary limit found in the teacher contract. It has nothing to do with what works for children like Katie who need a high level of individualized attention in order to learn.)

So one way or the other, I was feeling as if my child had been set up to fail. And that was before the suspensions began.

Unlike last time, the school district held off suspending Katie. This is probably because, for the first five weeks, it had failed to comply with the IEP (aka contract) by providing, among other things, a swing. (A swing helps Katie regulate her dysfunctional sensory system which was being subjected to countless assaults due to her transition.) The day after the swing was finally installed, however, the district began pressuring the principal to suspend Katie. The principal refused. Instead he asked me to pull Katie from school until we could hold a meeting to discuss the problem.

It felt like a suspension. The district staff called it a suspension. But the principal insisted it wasn’t.

So Katie missed three days of school for the it-feels-like-a-suspension-but-isn’t “non-suspension” because the school district couldn’t figure out what to do about her autistic behavior. Make sense? 

To be continued…

Until next time,
Cynthia Patton