Special Education is Not Special
Every year for the past 12 years, my husband and I have had to endure an IEP meeting - an IESP meeting, technically, as we are homeschoolers looking for a few services for our nonspeaking autistic son who is now 14.
We used to sue the NYC DOE in order to get as many service hours as possible and have the providers paid at a higher rate than the standard IEP allows. This was a process we were told to undergo by the service providers - not even kidding - who said that was the only way we’d get the required amount of services. This was backed up by the lawyers, who charge $10,000/year just to file the due process suit - far more if you actually end up being taken to court by the DOE. Many times, we’d say to them “What if we just asked the DOE for services as homeschoolers?” and they’d respond “That’s not done”. But of course, it is done - and once we met others homeschooling autistic children, we knew that. But we continued to sue because the providers would threaten to leave if they didn’t get as much money from us as they were getting from the lawsuit. We kept it up for years because we were scared to lose that support.
[Fun Fact: Providers would also say "If you let me take the hours of service your son missed this month, I will be able to use them to work with him in the future, should the DOE take away your services". Pro Tip: Don't ever agree to this. They NEVER have done this. Countless providers have left us (usually for a permanent job in a private school) with hundreds - yes hundreds - of hours that they never fulfilled nor ever expected to fulfill. Once we did lose some hours and asked a provider who'd been pre-paid for many hours of work she'd never done if she could now use those hours to work with us, she said "I need an income or else I can't make my rent payments".]
Luckily, the pandemic changed all of that. Our providers left due to the lockdown and some never returned; others returned in a limited capacity. What we found out when it was just us and our son was that he was far calmer doing his lessons with us, there was a lot less anxiety in each day, and his spelling/typing communication skills improved greatly because we did them with him frequently. He also excelled at the subjects he loved best - Chemistry and Physics - which his astrophysicist father with a PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard - taught him. So not only were our son’s standardized test scores highest of any previous year, he was also calmer than any previous year.
I say this to emphasize a few things:
1- Don’t invest too much energy, time, or money in “special education” therapists, teachers, schools, social workers, agencies, counselors, or lawyers. Their primary concern is the money they make off your child; not your child’s best interests.
2- Don’t listen to what they say about your child because they are all brainwashed by the system into thinking very little about nonspeaking autistic people. They see them as incapable of learning and therefore don’t teach them anything, and then use their disability as justification for their lack of education.
To better explain #2 - We just got our son’s IESP emailed to us this past week, and despite the fact that we had a long conversation in the meeting about how he will be going to college, as many of his nonspeaking autistic friends are already doing, and despite the fact that his standardized test scores - on typical standardized tests with accommodations but no modifications - were all in the 90s - the goals the “special education” team created for him for grade 9 - the first year of HS - were as follows (taking this verbatim from the IESP):
“Student will recite 9 lines of a book out loud by the end of the year”
“Student will type 15 words per minute by the end of the year with his hands in the QWERTY hand position on the keyboard”
Here’s what’s wrong with this, in case you don’t get it – all providers who work with him are legally bound to do what’s on the IEP/IESP. What this translates into, in most providers’ minds that we’ve dealt with over the years (and there’s been over 40) is “This is ALL I am required to do with this student”. It also translates into (as we’ve been told repeatedly when we ask them to do academic work with him) “We cannot focus on academic work until he has mastered his IEP/IESP goals”.
So my answer has always been “Ok, so if you don’t teach nonspeaking autistics any academics until they can speak - or type like a stenographer, then you must also not teach blind children any academics until they can see, correct? Or any deaf students academics until they can hear? Or parapalegic students don’t get academic instruction until they can wall?” I am met with blank stares. As if I am the one who is denying a child an education based on their disability.
My son spells and types to communicate. He does this with one finger, and it takes a lot of energy. He does it slowly to be precise and methodological because the main issue with nonspeaking autistics is that their bodies do not do what their minds tell them to do. Therefore typing (and speaking and using hand gestures and many other things) are hard to accomplish. However, his spelling and typing has been the easiest way we’ve found for him to communicate. So we wait for his responses because THEY ARE HIS ONLY MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. Also, his responses are often witty, insightful, kind, thoughtful, and intelligent. We absolutely relish his responses.
Over the years, special education providers that have worked with him 1 on 1 in our home have told me “this is so hard” over and over again, because they don’t have the patience to sit and wait for him to communicate. They have repeatedly refused to do grade-level work and treated him like an infant. They have been entirely inappropriate because they knew we had no alternatives. It therefore makes far more sense to me to have grade-level academic goals on his IEP while also instructing his teachers to work on their attitudes and their patience with disabled children. That would benefit him far more than these ridiculous, unattainable goals that only serve to deny him an education and make anyone who works with him feel justified in doing so.
