Joshua is my eldest son. He is 9 years old, and originally diagnosed with PDD-NOS, which now falls under Autism Spectrum Disorder, due to DSM manual changes. It was many years before we realized or more importantly would accept that there was something different, mostly because we were ignorant of the wide spectrum of autistic symtoms and him not fitting all of the typical ones.
He has always been very hyper, even from as early 1 year old. He very quickly destroyed his crib mattress from jumping repeatedly, very hard, and rhythmically. He said his first words at 6 months old. My family would not believe my wife and I, and neither would anyone else. But it is true. He started saying "I'm good," because we always told him how much of a good boy he was. He was speaking whole sentences and starting to read at 2. He drew pictures that looked like they were drawn by someone years older. He had a very rhythmic even, perfect way of speaking. As a matter of fact, he tried to be perfect at everything. He tried so much, that if he made a mistake, he got horribly angry and frustrated. But we didn't see the warning signs. Joshua was extremely impulsive, and randomly ran away from us. When a big truck scared him, he would try to run out into the street, not away from it.
Honestly, there's been so many years of things happening with them, that I can't even remember all the awkward things that he's done. He's very vocal and talkative, but completely inappropriate in dealing with others. We tried taking him to preschool, but the school did not know how to handle him properly, and we yanked him out, due to fears that they would allow him to get hurt because of his impulses. We ended up homeschooling him up through first grade.
At around 4-5, when my wife was in the hospital for an extended period of him from complications from being pregnant, things changed drastically. We had no vehicle at the time, and Joshua and I had to walk to the hospital to be with his mother every day. Things just ended up being too different, and I believe he started strongly regressing and having worse problems. He always had potty training issues, but they became worse at that point.
We came to the conclusion that he had all the symptoms of autism, and maybe some bipolar symptoms as well, and soon after, he was officially diagnosed. Eventually, it became too difficult to homeschool him without some help, so we wanted to see about putting him into public school for 1st grade. Unfortunately, although we warned the school about the way he acted, they did not believe it was more than they could handle. They found out they were wrong.
Anyways, we've constantly had to hold the school's feet to the fire for the last 2 years that he was in public school. Often it seemed the school was trying their best to look for excuses not to have to deal with him. The pinnacle of it came when "someone" in the school decided to call DCS on us because of an "odor coming from him". What it amounted to was him starting to become sick that day after he was already in school, because later in the day, he started having diarrhea, and not to mention the child has a tough time wiping himself well enough. So instead of talking to us about it and letting us address the concerns, they call DCS. That didn't do much, because when we told the DCS worker what hell the school had put us through and how much they had violated our rights, she immediately took our side. Not to mention, the accusations the school brought up were proven to be petty and unfounded. The time the next IEP came along, I was livid and calmly told them I was aware of what they had done and my wife and I were furious, and the DCS worker was completely on our side, along with Joshua's ABA therapist and intensive mental heath case manager.
Needless to say, we had fewer issues with the school at that point, and when they did come up, my wife and I made it known that we would not tolerate their garbage and made them do what they should do that was the best for Joshua. He will be leaving that school and teacher (who was a lot of the problem) to go to 4th grade, and going to a better over all school. Although now it turns out that what I'm assuming was due to school cutbacks and unacceptable contract renewals, the teacher for next year (which Joshua already knew and liked) ended up quitting, right before time for Joshua to get some special summer classes to help him adjust to the break. So...all of that went out the window and we are still in limbo, waiting to see what the new teacher is like. One thing for sure, I will let the teacher know first hand what happened last time, and will inform her/him that these mistakes will not be repeated.
No comments:
Post a Comment