Welcome to the Jungle

Preschool

When my son was almost 3 years old we decided to enroll him in a Parent Participation Preschool Preschool. I thought this would be a great environment for him to get used to preschool and I could still be involved. I thought my experience as a preschool teacher would come in handy and I could see how my son interacted. At this point he was still needing to chew his food, spit it out, then swallow it. He reminded me of a little bird. He was getting better at eating and he had come a long way, but he definitely stood out.

My observation of him at this school was that he was, as always, very happy to be around the other children. He would bounce up and down, flap his arms, and giggle as he watched the other children play. He always wanted to be near them, but he didn’t really know how to interact with them in a reciprocal manner. I thought that it was a little strange, but I also knew that it was the beginning of the school year in a new environment and it might just take him time to figure it out. He played with the trains, did puzzles, and was affectionate with the teacher. If another child pushed him or took at toy from him, he just walked away from them and moved onto something else. So I waited. By Christmas I could see that Parent Participation was not going to work for us. I was having a hard time not being the teacher, so it was clear that I should not be involved so deeply. I also felt like he needed to be in a more traditional preschool so I could find out if there was anything we should be concerned about.

I loved the school that we found. The Director had just bought the school and she was creating a great environment for the teachers and kids. The first few weeks when I picked him up I mostly heard that he had a “great day.” After he was there for two months, the teachers and director scheduled a meeting with me. In the meeting they told me that my son wandered around in a circle and did not play with any toys. He did not let the teachers comfort him when he was upset, and he did not use eye contact with anyone.

I was shocked, because I knew exactly what that sounded like- Autism Spectrum Disorder- and I just didn’t feel like my son had ASD. After all, he was affectionate and had great eye contact with me. He loved people! All I knew about Autism or Aspergers was that the kids “had no emotion.” Autism felt very trendy to me. In fact, I had just watched a 60 Minutes on it. I felt like the director was reaching trying to pull out something he had done and frame it in ASD. So I told her that I wanted her to do a full observation on him and I would take him to the psychologist and the school district to get diagnosed. After reading her observation I was beginning to open my eyes to the possibility that my son may need some help. This happened in March 2013.

It is very hard to get into a pediatric psychologist so I did not have an appointment until May and I did not have an appointment with the school district until June. As I waited I did a little more reading and talking to my best friend who is a teacher with Head Start. She sent me some checklists that she had received from an Autism workshop she had just been to. As I filled out the worksheets, I began to realize that it was quite possible that my son was on the spectrum.

As we waited for my son’s diagnostic appointments, he continued to attend the school and everyday when I picked him up there was some new issue they were having with him or he was having in the classroom. “Your son doesn’t like to wash his hands. He is not doing any art projects because he doesn’t want to wash his hands.” This was puzzling to me because at home he loved painting and getting dirty, and then of course, washing his hands. He liked playing in water as well. After I learned this, I went into his classroom after picking him up and said lets go wash your hands in the bathroom. He said “The fan, the fan, the fan. NO!” I said, “We will shut off the fan and then go wash your hands.” He was happy with that and from then on he had no problem doing art or washing his hands with the fan off. One day they told me “We are having trouble getting him to put his things away after meals.” This was strange to me because at the Parent Participation school he not only put his things away, but he also put other children’s things away. So when I picked him up from school after he finished his snack I asked him to throw his plate away. I told him that I would walk with him because he seemed anxious. As he picked up the paper plate everything fell to the floor. I now understood that he did not understand how to hold the flimsy paper plate. I showed him a trick of folding the plate and holding it with both hands. I also broke down the steps of “throwing it away.” It went on like this and it was clear that the teachers were getting more and more annoyed by his needs.

The Director informed me that when the children in his class moved up to the next classroom, she did not think the school would be a good fit for my son. My immediate thought was

“I can’t believe we are getting kicked out of preschool.”

I was angry, but I also understood that she was just trying to do what was best for my son and the new school she was forming. She had new teams of teachers that were working together for the first time and she didn’t want to make things more difficult for them. She said that they were very strict teachers and they may have a hard time working with my son. Part of me felt like the teachers should go and get educated, because my son was not the only child they were going to encounter with special needs. I knew that there weren’t many preschools in my area that had teachers that were professionally trained to work with special needs kids. The other part of me felt like I didn’t want to spend a whole year fighting with the school. I wanted to find a place that would take him with open arms.

I was a preschool teacher for 12 years. I loved being a teacher and I was a pretty damn good one. I would have never thought I would be in a situation where my son was being asked to leave a school. He was not violent, he did not hurt anyone, his only crime was that he was a little different. Mama Never Knows- I would have never thought we would be in this position.