Autism and bullying

Today, I’ll be hosting one of the 24 hours of the Communicate to Educate event, uber-hosted by The Coffee Klatch. My topic is bullying and special needs, especially as it relates to autism. Hope you can make the chat. Please try to join in.

Communicate to Educate 24 hr Event NOW at http://tweetchat.com/room/tck

And now, here's our bullying story.

It began in preschool. TH, our son with autism, would "get in trouble" with the worthless lazy cows at his "play-based" school (read: "teachers" sit on their asses all day while the kids re-enact Lord of the Flies for hours on end). He'd get the blame for an altercation, and since he couldn't communicate to us in any way we could understand what the actual sequence of events was, he couldn't defend himself verbally when the other child was standing there, pointing the finger.

It wasn't until the day that I stood there, looking over the fence and watching, that I finally got confirmation of what we'd thought all along: Another child would hassle TH, physically attacking him or pulling him off of the playscape or rip a toy from his hands, and after a brief struggle, TH--often the much larger child--would finally exert some of his strength to extricate himself or his toy. Very often, the child involved was a mature child for his age, savvy and aware. TH, as I noted, couldn't even communicate to us--at almost age 4--anything about what had happened in any intelligible way.

When he was diagnosed, we removed him from that school, which we should have done much sooner. Regret #1, noted.

When we moved from San Francisco to Austin, we entered TH in a great school to start kindergarten. His teacher was fantastic. The only problem was that our son, with autism, was paired with a child who had emotional disturbances, and they shared an aide. Guess which child required and got all of the one-on-one attention? Indeed, I spent that year volunteering in TH's classroom almost every day as his "aide" during the most work-intense period of the day. And that meant that I spent every day encountering some child who would approach me to "tell on" TH, to relate how he'd bumped them or grabbed them or made a face at them or said something weird enough to them that the incomprehensibility of it came off as ill intent. It also meant that the same-old, same-old started all over again, with a child antagonizing our son to the point that TH would finally retaliate in some way, only to be named as the one who began it. As before, it took adult observation--this time his aide--to confirm that he did not start these things. But what we didn't know was that he'd already now earned a reputation as a bully, thanks to his odd grimacing, garbled echolalia, relatively huge size, and body space issues. One woman--whose son, by the way, had threatened in the second week of kindergarten to cut off TH's head and throw it in the trash--emailed furious letters to the teacher and the school, complaining about "that kid" and requesting that he be removed from school. It wouldn't be the last time a parent made such a request.

His bad reputation snowballed in first grade and hit a nadir in second grade when it spilled beyond the school walls and into our neighborhood. Parents accused him of all manner of grievous offenses, yet we managed to establish that every single event was one of TH finally breaking down and retaliating. In one case, a parent complained to the school that our son had pinched his boy's arm "black and blue," when in reality, this child and another on the bus had been putting spit- and snot-soaked fingers in our son's ears, pinching him so hard as to leave crescent-moon-shaped marks all over his arm, and otherwise torturing him on the bus. TH had responded with a single pinch to one of their arms. Yet, thanks to his built-up background as a "bully," this translated into our child being the resident grade 2 monster, and to two parents showing up at the school to complain, demanding that our son be removed from the school and preferably locked up in an institution. One parent--a woman who is now, I believe, trying to obtain certification as a special needs educator--went ballistic about him and tried to blackball him from soccer in addition to slandering him to every person she could find--because he called her son by his name and attached the suffix "pooh" (as in Winnie-the...his favorite movie at the time). Meanwhile, our son was experiencing real, genuine bullying on a regular basis. Regret 2: That we let this build up to that point.

We went into crisis mode and presented the Circle of Friends program to the entire second grade. It was a great success for the most part--even though some parents made fun of it and our son and us, and people we had mistakenly thought of as friendly to us didn't sign off on it and even provided bizarre, half-assed rationales for not doing so--but when third grade rolled around, things changed. The students moved from class to class instead of being self contained, and TH lost his bearings completely. Kids once again started taking his strange utterances as mystifying insults, looked upon his grimaces as a threat, partly in the context of his huge size, and the distaste for our child arose again, like a malevolent Phoenix or at least a soul-sucking, existential-hellish game of whack-a-mole. Girls, in particular, started being emotionally abusive to him, telling him that they wished he were dead and in hell. One boy told him that he'd like to crush his skull into pieces and eat it like cereal.

The final blow--or, really, slice--came when a girl sliced our son's face with her fingernails during a playground scrum. He came home with open abrasions in three places on his face. No one had called us. No nurse had seen him. And this is where I have Regret 3.

I emailed a picture of his wounds to the school, including the principal. While TH's special education teacher and his language arts teacher got right back to me, we heard radio silence from the principal. Nothing. Finally, my husband sent an email detailing the entire history of our son's association with this girl, which stretched back to kindergarten and involved systematic targeting of our son on her part. I add that the school was well aware of this history and had gone so far as to ensure, at least for awhile, that she never came near our child. This goal fell away in third grade, and she targeted him daily on the playground. The principal declined to engage by email and we arranged to meet in person. The first words out of that man's mouth at this meeting were, "There doesn't seem to have been any ill intent involved." My regret? That I didn't immediately leap onto his desk, reach out and abrade his face in three places with my fingernails, and then ask, "You tell me how someone does that without ill intent."

Instead, we listened to him bullshit us for an hour, ducking and dodging my husband's pointed and persistent questions, and then we left. We then withdrew our son from school, and he has been happily homeschooled ever since.