Last week we had a meeting at Jared’s school to go over his IEP (Individual Education Plan). The teachers made some changes to his goals and PLOPs (Present Levels of Performance), but the real discussion was about two other topics: evaluation and transition.
The school conducted a series of evaluations of Jared’s skills in February, and they presented the results to us at the meeting. Jared is doing well – they find that he’s capable of doing age-appropriate work (first grade, since he’s six) and is performing in the average range. We were pretty impressed.
For Jared to score in the average range, that means that he had to perform exceedingly well given that he has the added distractions and problems that are a result of his autism. He missed a bunch of questions because he lost focus, and wouldn’t complete a test that involved writing with a pencil (he can’t bear the way it feels). And when you factor in that he started with a language delay, it’s clear that he did magnificently.
To make an analogy: It’s like if Jared finished in the middle of the pack in a marathon. A marathon that he gave everyone else a head-start on, and then carried 30 pounds of weight on his back and had to take a break every 5 minutes. Maybe he didn’t finish at the same time as a world-class runner, but he ran a much more difficult race. I’d like to see even a world-class runner do that.
So I’m impressed. While he struggled on the writing, he was above average in reading skills and matrix reasoning (typically a strong suit for autistics). And he also got marked down for not answering questions the way that the test requires them: for instance, one of the tests requires kids to identify pictures. Jared labeled one a “sculpture” but didn’t get credit because they were looking for “statue.” He also said “shape” when they wanted “rectangle,” but we’re talking about a kid who knows heptagons and parallelograms. I think he knows rectangles.
His distractability came into play in other ways as well: when asked “who brings letters?” he said “a fireman brings ladders.” After struggling to convince Jared that they were talking about mail, Jared said, “Daddy brings in the mail.” Absolutely true, but not what they were looking for. And I’m happy with the result because funny is always better than accurate at our house.
Another factor may have been that Jared is far-sighted, and didn’t get glasses until after the IEP meeting. He certainly looks cute in them, but I wonder how much better he would have scored if he could have seen the the test better.
But the end result of the meeting was the most gratifying: they’re kicking Jared out of his school. Next fall, Jared leaves the calm confines of Ruth Eason and heads off to Kindergarten at the same school Sierra attended. He’ll be going all day to a class of NT (Neuro-Typical) students with some additional support. His current school is recommending an assistant for the first quarter, but he may or may not get that.
We were worried at first about “mainstreaming” Jared beceause Kellie and I both know how cruel kids can be. I spent just about all 13 years of compulsory education being picked on at best, and beaten up at worst. But at 48” and 66lbs, Jared is above the 95th percentile on the growth charts (PDF) for both height and weight. And keep in mind that he’ll be 6 and a half when he gets to kindergarten and the other kids will be 5 and a half a the oldest. Anybody that messes with him in school has a death wish. And don’t get me started on how strong he is.
So things are looking good for Jared. For the other kids in his class? We’ll see.
Coming up: Sierra is entering middle school in the fall – will any of us survive the ordeal?
I haven’t posted a lot about autism here on my site, especially considering how big a part of our life it is. Part of that is that I don’t want this page to become a pity party because no matter what it seems like, Jared’s autism is the least of my problems. I’ve got a girl becoming a teenager here, people!
But seriously, the difficulties we face from Jared’s autism are incredibly minor compared to the joy he brings us. I’m not big on crying, but thinking back to the first time he sang “Twinkle Twinkle” to us (well, “Minkle Minkle” anyway) still gets me misty. And for a kid who is supposedly facing a language delay, he finds ways to use words surprisingly well. Example:
The other day I decided I wanted to read Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men series, so I took Jared with me to a local comic books shop. I spent some time looking at the early readers’ books, but couldn’t find any comics Jared would get into. So as I’m making my purchase and getting ready to leave, Jared says, “They don’t have books for kids?”
Now this is Jared’s way of asking, “aren’t you going to buy me anything?” And since the answer to that was no, and they didn’t really have anything for kids at his reading level, I said, “No, it’s for grown-ups.”
Jared thinks about this for a moment and says loudly, “Yeah, they’re for grown-ups. Who are kids.” Ow!
I looked at the guy behind the counter who was bagging my comics and we both decided that we were going to pretend that we hadn’t heard him. Some things are just too painful to recognize. And no matter how well trained you are at defending your comics addiction to other adults (“What, you didn’t like Road to Perdition? What about From Hell?”), there’s nothing you can do when a 6-year-old calls you out for reading picture books.
In any case, when you wonder what Jared got from his mother after seeing his red hair and fair skin and identical hands, feet and ears to his dad, the answer is: the uncanny ability to put his father in his place.
Which is all a long way of getting to: I feel like I need to apologize to those people who regularly read this blog. I have this whole side of my life that I haven’t been talking about that I’m realizing is terribly important. There are things going on in the autism community that need to get out to the rest of the world. More importantly, there are lessons we can learn from autistic people that we can’t learn from anywhere else.
So hopefully, I’ll find some time to blog about all of this in the near future. You know, in my copious spare time.
If you’re somebody who is already involved in the autism community, you probably need to read Amanda’s Questions for Neurotypicals on Ballasexistenz. I don’t have the time to explain what that all means to the rest of the world, but if you’ve seen the way that autistics are treated, you’ll definitely get something out of it.