AS and school (longish)

[Guest guest]

Hi--

I'm a new member, so I'll introduce myself. I'm Diane, mom of a 13

year old with relatively mild AS. We've been thru what is probably a

typical course...being told thru elementary school that C is gifted,

as an explanation for seeing her social difficulties in the classroom

setting. A full evaluation last year confirmed the AS we suspected

for a long time.

C has gone to public school through 6 grade, with great academic

success but increasing unhappiness, depression, and anxiety about

school. She has not had great social experiences at school, although

she has solid friendships (on a one-on-one basis) outside of school.

For 7th grade, my husband and I decided to try to eliminate a lot of

the environmental stressors, and enrolled C in a new, very small

private school. It's a K-8 school in its second year (run by an

experienced principal from another private school). There are about

100 kids in the school, 13 in 7th grade. The school has promoted

itself as a rigorous academic school which teaches " the individual

child " based on each individual child's needs. Sounds perfect, yes?

Before school started, my husband and I asked for what was effectively

an IEP meeting. We brought C's counselor and the evaluating

psychologist to try to outline what C's needs are, what situations

might prove difficult for her, etc. The teachers, principal and

classroom helper were there and said all the right things.

Well, here is our dilemma. They SAY the right things. But in

practice, they do not seem tuned in to C or what she needs. I had

hoped -- maybe naively -- that once we explained and they saw what C's

particular issues were, they would not only accomodate them, but try

to think about her, anticipate things, and plan accordingly so that

the dynamic would work for her. There are only 13 kids in the class,

so that didn't seem unreasonable, I didn't think.

Time after time, we are finding that her main teacher doesn't seem to

have a clue. She's a great and dynamic teacher in terms of presenting

the info to the class and making learning fun. But attending to C,

understanding what might be hard for her, and helping her BEFOREHAND

simply has not occurred and, we now think, may just not be within her

skill set. We've removed C from PE at school, as we saw the PE

teacher there as simply not being able to get her issues, and she was

finding the whole dynamic so humiliating that she hated, hated HATED

going to school on PE days.

For now, we have stopped waiting for them to help us figure out what

will work for her (I had expected, again naively, that we'd be

" partners " and that they would work with us to make school a good

place for her.) Now, we are in a stage where we just TELL them what

we think needs to happen. They accomodate that, or at least say they

will, but we're not convinced that they are being anything close to

proactive to make school a good place for her.

So, where from here? We are going in next week to talk to the

principal, and thinking of calling another IEP to regroup and be

clearer about our expectations for how things will be for C at school.

We hesitate to get to get to negative with them, as we don't want to

be perceived as " problem parents " but we feel our expectations are

high, especially because the class is so small and they keep talking

about how they teach the " individual. " We want to convey our

impression thus far that they don't do what they say.

I'm concerned about 8th grade next year, very concerned about high

school, and starting to research home-schooling and online school

alternatives. But I guess I'm hoping some of you can give me advice.

Maybe it's just that my husband and I have been too naive about this

school, and we need to get a lot more aggressive about insisting on

what we think will be best for C, without expecting them to help us

arrive at that as a team.

Anyway, any advice will be appreciated.