The teacher is not at school right now. I don’t know if she’s sick or away for other reasons. The good news is that my son is perfectly happy with the substitute.
I have her phone and email. I’ll text her tomorrow and find out when she’ll be back. I’ll take it from there.
((Hugs)) Sunny Daze. You are doing the right thing. This needs to be dealt with right away, and advocating for your child is the best thing you can do.
But if she dodges you, go nuclear.
If your child is in a class for autistic children, then he must have an IEP*. YOU have the right to call an ARD** at any time. If the teacher is not available, so be it. If there’s not another class he can join for the last two months, the IEP can be modified so that he spends that time in a study hall or as an assistant to another teacher, the library, or the office. ANYTHING but a class which has the proven potential to make him feel suicidal.
*Individual Education Plan
**Admission, Dismissal, and Review
(I’m a former special ed teacher)
Sorry to hear this. It’s one of the few times I’ve let out an audible *holy shit *reading a thread. My daughter is not autistic but was in the special needs groups since second grade. I always had the utmost respect for her teachers and paraprofessionals, and I feel like we all shared the sense that these kids don’t need to be told that life is hard, I mean, they’re living it. (?) No advice to add, just wishing you luck.
There are other kids in this class who may be as affected by the teacher as your child was; maybe someone else has had a meeting with her and that is why she’s not in school. I have been worrying all through this thread about all those other kids too. Good luck and I hope she doesn’t come back.
I was in the same situation tees kid was in school and we had various life skills classes through out jr and senior hs
I wonder if the police guy gave them the same advice we got … the situation was " your shifty friend shows up in a new car you go for a ride and it get stopped and they take the both of you in for GTA
He said and I quote :
“if your caught just make a plea deal as youll be found guilty anyways and going through a trial will just make a judge mad” you’ll just get probation that wont be permantly on your record or youll get 90 days and maybe do 2 a week or two at the most "
the teachers were WTF…
Jesus. You read someone tell you about an experience they had and you’re ready to diagnose mental issues on a total stranger?
A teacher is telling kids that life is hard. That’s true. And helpful for kids whose life IS hard. The feelings you’re having about life being hard is normal and expected.
What appears to be missing is the HIGHLY IMPORTANT message that life is also fun and exciting and full of possibility. That their disability is also an advantage when looked at in the right way.
IF this is not being conveyed, the right thing to do is talk to the person directly. Ask if they are aware of your concerns. Ask if they are prepared to do anything about it. And give them a chance to change it. IF nothing changes, then escalate it to the proper people (IMHO, the principal).
My heart goes out to any parent who has a suicidal child, but let’s not run to kneejerk, ridiculous reactions based on highly limited knowledge of people we don’t know.
The teacher brought the officer (female) in to do a “scared straight”, so there was no WTF. The kids are autistic, so the result was questioning and arguments. My son was asked to write an apology letter to the officer because he argued so much. I didn’t follow up with him on that. I may, in fact, have found the exchange amusing. It went something like this I’m told:
'Beamer: So if someone hits us, and we hit them back, we could get sent to juvenile detention?
Officer: yes
'Beamer: That’s stupid
Officer: You’re not allowed to hit people
'Beamer: Not even if they’re hurting us?
Officer: That’s right
'Beamer: That’s stupid
Officer: In juvenile detention, you will be in a cell where people can see you all the time
'Beamer: I’m not doing that
Officer: It’s the law
'Beamer: Even when you go the bathroom?
Officer: Yes
'Beamer: I’m not doing that. That’s stupid.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
Longtime teacher here. And on the other end of things, my daughter is learning/language disabled, though not autistic, so I have been on your side of the table in trying to advocate for someone who isn’t necessarily neurotypical.
The advice given looks very good, and I wish you luck. It’s a rotten situation.
One thing that I did wonder about. It LOOKS like your kid is the source for the info about what the teacher has been saying (life is hard, getting a career is difficult, you’ll have a tough time getting ahead). Is that the case, or is there independent confirmation that this has been the drumbeat all through the year (other parents saying their kids are reporting the same thing, actual observation of the class…)?
The reason I ask is that kids do view what goes on in a classroom through their own personal lenses. We know your boy has a tendency to look on the dark side of things. Is it possible that he is exaggerating the degree to which the teacher is sending this message? I do NOT mean to imply that he’s lying, or selectively reporting on purpose, anything like that. But I wonder if your son is picking up the negative much more readily than the positive, and that the “but you can do this/you can do hard things/some things will be easier than you might expect” part of the message is there, just not getting through. I have seen this sort of thing from both sides of the table–parents saying I’m doing things I’m not actually doing (or the reverse) based on what their kids have said, my daughter reporting things that probably aren’t truly going on just as she describes them… No one’s “fault,” just the kind of thing that can happen.
Should this be a possibility, and I recognize it may not be, then:
If you go in and suggest that there’s way too much negativity, the teacher may be confused and/or react defensively. Because, after all, she thinks she’s being very even-handed (and from a completely neutral perspective she may be). Thus, it may be sensible for you to approach the situation not from a global “I’m concerned about your teaching” perspective, but from a perspective of “This is not working right for my kid; what can we do?”
I think in general that keeping the focus on the kid rather than on the curriculum is wise in any given parent interaction with a teacher, and this seems like a situation where that is especially warranted.
I suspect there’s a good chance you would’ve done this anyway, andf I do not mean to suggest otherwise! And if you do have independent confirmation that this has been going on all year, with nine negative comments to every positive one, then addressing the situation from your kid’s perspective may not be so necessary. But I do think the odds are you’ll get better results if you frame it as “What can you do within the context of what you’re doing to help my kid, who is not seeing the bigger picture here?”
As I said, good luck!
Yeah, that isn’t going to play. You don’t destroy a human being’s right to self-defense. My parents would have made that very clear to Officer Dipshit over there, and did, in fact, make it exceptionally clear to my brothers and me that we weren’t allowed to start fights, but we were allowed to finish them.
That SPED teacher sounds like a dumbshit, too: If you take anyone and tell them that their next life stage is going to be full of unremitting fucking misery and terror, without offering them any strategies for coping… well, I trust it doesn’t shock your moral values when a terminal cancer patient commits suicide, and if it does, you lack some important life experience.
So what came of this? Is he still in the class that’s making him suicidal?
Bloody hell, that would be inappropriate for any kids. Of any age, even. I mean, school isn’t supposed to teach you that life is teddy bears and thornless roses (it certainly isn’t) but they’re also not supposed to be telling you that it’s going to be a vale of tears with no sunshine ever. That would be depressing to anybody. I’d talk with the teacher first, then if she sticks to her guns go over her head, but what I don’t understand is why did she think it was a Good Idea to be telling her kids “your life is going to suck, get used to it.”
12 is also when I was this >< close from jumping off a balcony because I never could do anything right, therefore any breath I took was just a waste of good air that could have gone to someone capable (hey, we hadn’t studied the oxygen cycle yet, gimme a break). Kids that age are at the edge of the emo years without any need for help from their grown ups.
I agree with this 100%. An informal meeting with the teacher and relying on her good will is not adequate when suicide is an issue. You need to get the entire IEP team involved.
It sounds to me that the teacher’s background is in behavior disorders rather than autism. It would be interesting to know what her credentials are.
I hesitate to say this, but you said the suicide ideation is not an issue any more. This does not mean it won’t come back. You really need to take strong steps now to help your son calm down.
p.s. My son is on the spectrum and I’ve had to deal with similar issues as a parent.
Then you need to escalate this asap. Since this teacher also manages the IEP, I’d get the school district’s special ed director involved.
I talk with the teacher often, and she has discussed this with me on a regular basis. The confirmation I have comes from her directly. I just didn’t put all the pieces together until that meeting with my son’s psychiatrist.
The teacher in question has been out all week. I’m going to talk to the Vice Principal on Monday on a drop in basis. We’re going to take my son out of her class entirely for the rest of his year. Our longer term ask is a modification to our son’s IEP to a different school or environment. We have an attorney who specializes in this type of law. If need be, we’ll get her involved. He needs a lot more special ed support than this school can give him, even though he is also smart and able to be in Advanced Science and Math.
This is 100% accurate. She has no formal training in autism and it shows. She 100% means well, but she needs more training given that she’s the autism teacher for the district’s middle school students.
Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure about that.
It sucks when a district can’t or won’t provide the support a kid needs. Not sure what your boy is entitled to by law in your state, but it sounds like getting the attorney into the mix would be very sensible.
Good luck.
if it was in CA her son himself can ask to go to another class …through an meeting
I attended many of these and received most the changes I wanted the ones I didn’t were either because me and the teacher were confused with each others goals or the district didn’t inform of something important … like the English teacher didn’t know I have physical problems and my handwriting skills aren’t even considered “legal” (ie the only thing I can legally write is my name …) or the typing teacher didn’t know I cant hold my hands in the “correct” typing position so I 3 finger type everything …
Or the time they hired some chick that was great at running computers and such for the lab but had the “social skills of a alcoholic shut in” (my resource teachers words not mime ) teach programming classes …
Dang, bringing in law enforcement to talk to autistic kids is fraught–who in hell couldn’t see that setting up an authoritarian in opposition to kids who don’t blindly accept authority unless said authority has a reasonable logic chain to justify their position and is ready to defend it would be a problem? I know perfectly well how swimmingly that goes over (like a fart in a bathysphere, for those playing along at home) even for a neurotypical kid with a distinct preference for evidence based rules and an unwillingness to back down from an argument. For an autistic kid who simply CAN NOT reconcile these conflicts without a fair amount of guidance and explanation it must be torture to be told they must accept as truth that which every instinct and bit of knowledge they have insists is false.
That’s fucked up. My first husband has Aspberger’s and is bipolar so I had a lot of experience dealing with that kind of world view–it always felt like he was a record player that, if it got stuck on a skip, would go on forever until someone fixed it. You can get mad and choose to perceive that as obstinacy or opposition or you can just deal with it to keep everything running correctly. It’s like getting pissed because your friend can’t walk as fast as you–people do it, but FFS what’s the point?
This is a great analogy. I am stealing it. 
While the other advice sounds great, I do wonder if he needs someone to basically counter all the bad stuff with reasonable perspective. Maybe even go overboard the other way.
I’m not autistic, but if I received that sort of instruction, I would’ve been messed up, too. That sort of instruction only possibly makes sense for people who have continual problems with problematic behaviors.
My mom teaches kids with disabilities, at about the same age. They do nothing remotely like this.