Friday, February 27, 2009

Summer worries

It’s already starting – the panic of “What do I do with my kid for the summer?”
I could leave him at the home daycare he’s in now. The only problem is that he’s fine there for the hour he usually spends there after school, but the full days (when school is closed) can sometimes be a bit taxing on him. The twelve-year-old son of the daycare mom – the one who also has Asperger’s - hits all the kids. Monster hates it. He hates the uncertainty of what sort of day he is going to have there. Sometimes Matt might hit him, and he never knows when.
And if I leave him there, I won’t lose my space and will still have after-school care for next fall.

There is a place here that deals with special-needs kids where Monster spent half days last year. I want him to go there, but he may be too old (7 is the cutoff, and depending upon how much they want him, they can say 7 is too old, or 7 is the oldest he can be). The care would be covered by Monster’s PCA hours. Plus, this place also has OT, PT, friendship club, group music therapy, social skills classes, speech/language therapy, therapeutic listening, and Stressbusters. What I really, really want is for Monster to go here all day and be pulled out of respite for these classes, which I’m guessing are once a week for an hour each and probably don’t overlap each other in any way. He’d still have plenty of time to play with the lids, but we’d be killing about 10 birds with one stone by getting all this therapy done, a bit each day, all summer long, so he isn’t losing important skills over the summer, and hopefully learning new ones.

But for some reason they look upon Monster as a burdensome child, one who needs one-on-one attention (not true anymore, and I’ve told them that), one who can sometimes hit or push other kids (but this school is FOR these kinds of kids – don’t tell me he’s the only one). We would need to make his lunch each day (the prepaid hot lunches where I just refill his account each time the money in it gets low has spoiled us), and drive him both there and back – a trip that takes us many miles north and west of where we work. We can do it.

There is one more option that at once seems perfect and then in the next instant seems dishonest and mean. And maybe not fair to Monster.

There is a charter school I believe is on the brink of having a place for Monster. It is a year-round school with its own before- and after- and off- school days. This place is an affiliate of a center that specializes in the needs of ASD children. It’s one I’ve been trying to get him into for two years, since Monster’s kindergarten year started out hellishly and never really got better.

I have a huge resentment in me that our school district, considered one of the best in the area, refuses to set up a high-functioning ASD program for children like Monster. Every single city surrounding us (and I mean this literally – I’ve called them all) has a high-functioning ASD program. We don’t. So parents at my support group tell me, ask for open enrollment. Well, it turns out that each one of these programs is never less than 75% full, which is ther limit for allowing a child from another district in. And yet, my school district’s special ed supervisor tells me there just isn’t enough NEED in our city for this type of program. And I call bullshit. They set up a classroom for 6 children with EBD problems. You can’t tell me there aren’t at least 6 kids with high-functioning autism or ASD in the entire school district, because then I’d know you’re lying.But no. So my resentment sends me back again and again to the charter school who knows all about these kids AND has NT children too to model for the others nomal behavior. I want to tell them if they ask me, why, yes, I’ll start Monster in second grade the beginning of July, and let him be there a couple of months and see how it works for him. If it doesn’t work, I pull him out and plop him back in his current school the beginning of THEIR school year in September.
Oh, and did I mention that their after-school care takes PCA hours too???

Part of me, the part of me that deep down knows what is right, sees my son in his current school setting and thinks, it may have taken them a year, but they’ve gotten it right. He has so many teachers who care about him and want to see him succeed. He loves his school and says his teachers all “rock”. So, why mess with perfection?

Because part of me still feels that perfection for my son would be a place with children he understands who understand him right back. How funny (or sad) is it that the one child that my son is drawn to in his regular first-grade room, where he spends some time most days, is the other misfit of the whole class? My son’s birthday party was a couple of weeks ago, and one of the children he insisted on inviting was Max, the kid he has developed a special bond with in his 1st grade class. Max came, and when his mom came to pick him up she looked at me, sort of puzzled, and asked, “Soccer, right?”Oh my gosh!! Max from soccer!! Here was a group of 4- and 5- year olds who were at least making an attempt to understand the game but Max and Monster would not go after the ball, run away if it came toward them, and run in the opposite direction when the ball was going the other way. His mom and I just sat and laughed as the serious soccer parents would command their tiny supertars to keep their eye on the ball, yell out, “Oh!! You should have been able to get that one!” and other things. The other parents avoided us like the plague because we obviously didn’t take our 4-year-old’s soccer skills seriously enough and the team kept LOSING because of it (mind you, there were no scorekeepers and nobody was supposed to worry about scores, but some parents just couldn’t help).

He needs to find other children like him, and they all need to find each other and discover they aren’t alone and see themselves through these other kids’ eyes and see how they aren’t wrong or weird, just different. Then they can all go play video games together.

So I try to fight my resentment that my son is forced to be in an EBD class when the school has no excuse to not make a special room just for kids like Monster.

I will have a really hard time if it does come down to getting that envelope in the mail saying, we want your kid at our school. It’s all so complicated, because I have to make everything complicated.

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