Autism-World

I am wondering if school districts are required to provide therapy services to preschool age children who are homeschooled?  More specifically, if the school diagnoses our son with autism would they still provide the 25-30 hours of programming if we pull him out of the public school?  In our state anyway I believe children are not legally required to attend school until they are 7 years old, and don’t have to start kindergarten until 6 years old, so I wasn’t sure if the homeschooling rules applied to younger children.  Our pediatrician agrees with the autism diagnosis but the school eval isn’t until November 3rd.

I am really leaning more and more towards pulling our four-year-old son from preschool for a couple of reasons.  The biggest reason is his health – in the first seven weeks of school he has been sick for over two of those weeks and regaining strength for two more – and currently has been sick for the last week and a half and is not yet getting better.  He hardly has the strength to climb the stairs right now and dropped his weight from over 36 pounds down to 30 pounds.  He has had three courses of steroids, two courses of antibiotics, needed extra nebulizer treatments, been put back on 24-hour tube feedings for the last week (which he still isn’t tolerating and spends the days and nights gagging, wretching, coughing, etc.), back on reflux medication, and changed to an amino acid based formula.  If he doesn’t start improving soon he will likely be hospitalized.  I really don’t see the benefit of public school if he is just going to spend 50-75% of his time sick and trying to regain his strength.  However, I don’t want him to miss any important benefits of therapy services and anything else the public school might provide in that regard.  Also, he loves going to school so it would be a little hard to pull him because of that. 

The second reason that I am leaning towards pulling him is actually a comment that really bothered me that his teacher made a couple weeks back.  We were talking about language acquisition and communication and she stated that she was really surprised that he was picking up the idea of picture symbols for communication because she didn’t expect him to be at that point yet (he’s actually doing pretty well with that), but that he would always need an augmentative form of communication because if he developed any verbal speech at all it would just be a few words here and there and he would never have the capability for typical language development.  I guess I realize that he may never speak, or speak as well as typical children and adults, but what bothered me was that she just stated that as fact without any room for the possibility that he ever could develop spoken language, however remote.  To me that kind of attitude seems to lend itself to giving up, to not looking for alternative ways of teaching if the one you try first doesn’t work, to assuming the worst possible outcome rather than striving for bigger and better, etc.  Does that make sense?  My husband wanted to pull him right away when I mentioned that to him, but we really can’t afford to pay for an outside eval at this point, so we either need the school to provide the services or to have them pay for an outside eval if necessary.  Furthermore, someone else (I don’t remember who) told me that the reason our son had a successful year last year (if you could call it that) was because he was in this particular classroom with this teacher, and that the other teacher at the school wouldn’t have been able to handle him, or known what to do with him as far as teaching strategies I guess.  In other words, the only other option for him would have been the segregated classroom for children with multiple disabilities.  I’m not sure what type of placement will be recommended after his eval – I had talked with his preschool teacher earlier about that and she said that he would not be offered an ABA program at his current school because of where the staff are located that have training in that area, but it would depend on the recommendations of the team as far as where he would be placed.

Any thoughts?  I’m not sure I’m looking at this from the most clear headed perspective so I welcome any input.  Between our four-year-old being sick and the baby also catching everything it’s been a long couple of months. 

Thanks so much.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Autism Education Issues, Parent Resources.