Kindergarten Autism Style

Here it is! Fall of 2008, time to start School!

I will say that the school team did a great job of helping us cherry-pick his teacher to get one that we all felt would do well with him. Mrs. Davis with USD 259 was the perfect pick!

She cared about him strongly, and worked her heart out for him, implementing anything we could think of to help him. Shortly into the year, we all realized (through tears on all sides - even the teachers!) that mainstreaming him had been a horrible call on Rainbows part. Unfortunately, restarting the IEP process takes months. It took 9 months that first time, and I was terrified it'd be the same this time.

The school was phenomenal though and got his testing starting fairly fast, got their autism consultant in there to observe him, and as they got closer to an IEP, they even went ahead and pulled in para-educator support for him even though he hadn't been approved yet.

That marked the day of change for little Emerson (and Mrs. Davis!). The para was able to give him that one-on-one he absolutely needed to stay on task, alleviate stress and anxiety, and prevent meltdowns - but also to control them when they happened.

Instead of destroying the classroom and sending the class into panic mode, he was able to start calming down and earn rewards, able to do some school work, looked forward to school. It was a huge change!

Everything wasn't perfect - he at that point was so terrified of the art class that he never went back to the class again, he still would run out of the class room for latchkey, and he still had extreme issues with eating in the lunch room. But I no longer had meetings with the principal daily to discuss what he did that day!

From Pre-school to Kindergarten!

That first year was hard hard hard. We had no idea, read way too many scary things, and people seemed so intolerant and harsh to us.

He went from Rainbows to special ed preschool, still wasn't potty trained at 4 years old. Then back to Rainbows for the summer, and stayed there for the pre-school year. He finally potty-trained at 4 1/2 though he still has accidents today.

At the end of the year, they made the brilliant decision to main-stream him and remove his IEP. He tested wonderfully they said and there was no reason to keep him on.

It was a wonderful and yet terrifying decision that turned out to be yet another horrible battle in his life as he started his Kindergarten year.