I am Mad as hell!!

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I am so right now! my Aspergers child has been denied attending any fun end of the year activity by his teacher. She feels that Vladimir does not deserve to attend because he is defiant. She obviously does not understand nor wants to his disability. We used to email back and forth "to help" Vladimir. Last week she suspended Vladimir alleging she had the email to prove that he was not doing well in class. I wish I had her number so I could tell her a thing or 2. Mind you to suspend him she had to have sent 4 pink notes home prior however the conselor accepted her email. I feel betryed and disapointed. Can you girls help me write a email to the principal and her telling them a thing or 2? thanks.

First off, I am not a girl,

Second, if you have copies of the emails, then I would suggest to forget the principal at this point and write a letter to the superintendent of schools stating that your sons rights have been violated and that you intend file a complaint with the Department of Education in your state regarding this incident. I would then send the letter certified mail and CC the principal.

I would also demand an IEP meeting with this teacher, principal, and counsler in attendence to:
1) If a behavior plan was in place, to see why it broke down
2) If a behavior plan was not in place, to get one in place
3) Determine why said behavior occured

<sarcasm>What a great way to make sure that a child who already hates the setting they are in learn to like it even better.</sarcasm> They are setting themselves up for quite a few problems come September if the issue is not resolved.

How many pink notes has the teacher sent home to date?

Here is some advice and I warn you, I don't claim it's good advice, just advice:
1.Make a subject up or get your child to make it up. (AS it's made up, they won't instinctlevly know about it)
2.Devise a test on it.
3.Expect teacher to know how to do it.

honey gets you more than vinegar............yes, it s@#%!...go over her head. start with the principal and work your way up to the superintendent. try to calmly state your case, and make certain you have supporting evidence ( emails etc)....did you ever get any pink notes ?

No pink notes, that was my 1st. She is using the emails she sent me as warnings? I thought it was to help Vladi. I have already spoke the principal and he just went on to compate his NT 9 1/2 year old sons shyness to Vlad AS!

I did end up sending a nasty email to her and cc principal, psyche, special Ed director and the president of the School District board. I got attention. I was called by a representative from the board who listened to all I had to say and went on to promise me that Vlads final weeks will be pleasant and that before the next school year begins he will be setting up a meeting for all of us teachers and psyche so we can all be on the same page regarding every aspect of Vladimirs education.

Lets see if it is true......

Our son had a dx, an IEP and an aide at his school. None of it helped - they learned how to ratchet up the stress and put him in total melt-down first by lunch, then in December, they were calling me by 8:30 a.m. (school starts at 8:15 a.m.).

When they expelled him, even he wanted to know who would kick a kid out of school just before the holiday party near the end of December.

By that point, we knew they had him keyed to the point where he really shouldn't have gone since they would have made his life miserable. Despite everything, they knew which buttons to push to put him into tantrum.

We decided the short-term heartbreak was better than the long-term humiliation and bullying by teachers, administrators and fellow students. He never went back and he has improved so much. Some schools just won't go to the effort to teach our children - they all need to be obedient little automatons that sit quiet and regurgitate information on demand. Any spark of life or imagination will not be tolerated.

Good luck, but you're right to to wait to see the proof.

three2camp:

What you have to say does not surprise me. There is a couple here in Rochester with 2 sons who have PDD-NOS. After one year with the school system, they decided to go it alone. They ever put their story in the newspaper (made the district look bad). In fact, I liked the line about how the parents are only looking after their children when discussing with the school board the problems with the district regarding children with Autism.

I think part of the problem is that schools get to make up their own rules regarding what a diagnosis is independent of what the medical field thinks (the State of MN has a set of rules for offering services for child with ASDs that is 72 pages and from what I see, independent of any medical diagnosis).

What scares me the most is that the education system has not changed since I was a child. They even try to bully the parent into complince when possible (they tried to threaten abuse charges against my mother if she did not agree with them and let them run roughshod over her).

Gosh, and people wonder why I am so against the current educational system and want to see radical change.

Let me tell you I am very close to having him home schooled! this year was just so bad all around. He may be going to a different school next September I have really mixed feelings about it though.

three2camp: so what did you do?

im not a parent, but an aspie... i can ponly say what i had to deal with at school

i was not diagnosed with as untill a couple of months ago. way since ive left school

at school my teachers did not really take much interest in me. they thought i was being naughty and disruptive. a couple of month after started big school i got suspended for 2 days by my headteacher. i was crying because i didnt know what id done wrong

he told me what id 'done'. he saying that an 18 year old coloured girl from the sixth form went to him and told him that i called her a n****r. i then asked him what a n****r was, and he said you know exactly what it means. im suspending you for being a racist.
but the thing is. i never use words that i dont know the meaning of. and id never met this girl in my life. but it was school policy to suspend anybody who is racist, even if they deny it.
i did not call her anything. and im not racist. but because i was a 'known trouble maker' they didnt belive me.
as for that, 'trouble making'. i reacted to my bullies. my bullies never got caught. they called me names, they hit me, they punched me they made me upset and angry calling me a ret*d and a spaz and loony and syndrome. So i stabbed them with my pencil, or i kicked them or if i was stood, threw my chair and / or table at them. so of course i was the one who got into trouble. none of the teachers took any notice of me at all and told me to ignore the bullied and walk away and theyd leave me alone.
but they never did. they kept on all the way up school. and when i started playing the drums, the bullies stole my drumsticks and then threw them at me, causing bruises, which i would show to the teachers and say that these boys were throwing them at me but the teachers just ignored me as if to say 'so what' infront of a multicoloured bruise on my leg.


i never hated the tachers though.. i just thought they didnt know how to do their job because at college they didnt get any trainign on how to deal with bullies. just how to do the teaching aspect of the job. id say half of a teachers job these days is to stop bullying, but they dont know what they are doing.
i was very sad lonely and depressed at school because of all of this. back then i didnt have a clue was aspergerssyndrome even was. id never heard of it. it was only when i l took my final exam in english that i caught sight of this.

i was an average english student. not brilliant. i didnt study all that hard for my exams. when my english language exam came up i sat down and started reading. the exam was in the style of a booklet with 3 or 4 articles on bvarious subjects, and then another book with lined pages, and you had to write about the article depending on the question asked.
one of these such articles was about aspergers syndrome from the view of a teenage boy. i read it and i thought... im very much like this person with my attitude and view on things. i answered the question in full, and i waited for my results. i got an A* for this exam and an A for the literature segment. i was shocked.
i went on the internet to find out more about AS and got more and more convinced i had it. so i went to my docto who referred me to a psychologist who didnt take long to diagnose me.

i just wonder why my teachers or parents ever thought about it. assuming i was a badly behaved child.... im only 22 now so this wasnt all that long ago.

Drummer girl~ I am sorry that you went through all this. That is so sad that nobody ever paid enough attention to see what was going on.

I knew DS was different when he was about 8 but it took me a year to convince the pediatrician then when he had a melt down in her office she said ohh! duh! but yes my son is seen as trouble now I hate it! I am 28 and look about 24 y/o so I think they see me like a dumb girl who became a teenage mommy. Regardless this mommy is always going to defend her baby

Drummergirl - that's pretty much how we saw my son's life going. He came home from school upset because boys were using him for target practice with basketballs during recess and HE was suspended for defending himself. He didn't want to share his cookies so the other boy threw them on the floor and said HE did it and he was punished. They had him in a state of near-constant rage every day. We didn't even recognize him at home at anymore - they had conditioned him to a raw response of violence and anger for every thing. When we kept telling them to stop punishing him, start listening, try to smooth things out all they did was make it worse.

We homeschool. It's actually taken several months unschooling/deschooling to begin seeing my boy again. Now that he's learned a more violent response, we still have occasional flare-ups, but it's so much better.

He's happier, he has more than a few friends even, he will occasionally pick up a pencil. His tantrums and rages are now maybe once or twice a week instead of every hour.

We didn't have a lot of faith in deschooling - initially thought we just had to keep our boy in learning mode. But it was horrible - he just couldn't handle it after everything that had been done to him. Now that it's been a few months, he's starting to show an interest in learning again and we're starting slowly. Luckily, we live in a state where we can do that. Our laws are very lenient - if you consider homeschool, be sure to check with the laws in your state. If you are thinking about it and you're on summer break, then put yourself into your new teacher mode as a trial run.

Teaching math can be done with board games or in the kitchen. Language arts can be done with story-telling and reading. Try some field trips to local points of interest for some history. Once you start seeing the learning opportunities that your child has every day, it doesn't seem like such a hard thing to keep teaching him/her. And, yes, parents can teach their kids - we've already taught them to walk and talk and ride a bike, we've hopefully taught them manners (but that seems to go out the window once they get on a school playground), why can't we teach them fractions over a pie or baking bread?

You gotta love the way the public school system works. My mom kept saying if she had it her way, I would be put in private school.
I do feel for those that teach in public school because what they go through with low pay, parents not giving damn about their kids, and in high school violence between students.

Private schools are no better. There the children think that they are eliete and insult anyone whose background is not similar to theirs. At least that is how it works in lovely Rochester Minnesota

In this state if you send your child to a private school and he has a classification the public school must pay for his special education. so even if you send him there he is still at the mercy of the school district we live in. the funding comes for the distrct we live in so they still have their say.. and the way they handle this is that they BUS the special ed kids to the public school for a few hours a week to learn in their school because of the cost to send a special ed teacher to the private school.. Money Money Money! its sad what our children must endure to get an education.. as much as I love home schooling idea I know that we could never have this option. Ryan needs the structure of the school. home is his comfort zone. there are rules here but not like at school.. this would be Ryans only socialization would be in school.. do you think its a good idea to take your Aspie kid who struggles with social behaviors and keep him home and he never learns social behaviors with his peers.. but I know it can work for some folks.. is totally unique to each case though... i know if my son was being bullied i would think about home schooling. but i am one of the lucky ones who does not have a son who is bullied.. he is rather aloof. although they make fun of him he passes it all off.. I have always told him the ones who must tease and bully are the ones who don't have a good home life and end up to be loosers as adults.. all the girls who bullied me are nothing but loosers now.. I tell him these kids are jealous of the safe wonderful caring home life he has!

so sorry to hear about your district's attitude towards special ed. sounds like they figure it doesn't matter how they educate special ed kids, just that they do...........i, too, have not considered homeschooling for the same reasons as you~my son needs to learn how to get along with his peers, and he's certainly not going to do that by learning at home.i understand that some folks prefer to homeschool, but it's just not a possiblity for us~especially since i'm the only one qualified to do the teaching, and i work full time.