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I am a parent of Benjamin, one of the sneakiest kids you have ever met. He
will bounce around a room aimlessly while you are watching and the second
you turn your back reprogram your computer keyboard so that you can't even
type the sequence to clear it again. He can hold a remote control for less
than 10 minutes and persuade your satellite dish to point to the outer
planets. Ben convinced one day-care provider that he was too handicapped to
use a spoon and fork. Just recently he used the trampoline in his day-care
provider's backyard to bounce over a privacy fence into a neighboring yard
so that he could play with a watering can.
Ben is also seven years old and severely autistic. If you have never worked
with an autistic child before, please forgive me: I am not able to
"summarize" his condition in a few sentences. The diagnosis of autism covers
such a wide range of conditions that I rarely find two autistic people that
seem to have the same disease. Instead, let me add these stories to your
image of him: the only consistent "reward" for Ben, using ABA techniques, is
still candy, the same reward system we started with when he was three years
old. Ben can only sustain a few seconds of eye contact with an adult and
even less with a peer. Ben has some behavioral issues centered around
anxiety and he becomes amazingly anxious just being in the same room with
another child, let alone a whole classroom full. And, the piece that is most
disabling of all: his two year old baby brother has more language, both
expressive and receptive, though Ben has received several years of intensive
work around language issues.
It is that last issue, language, which makes inclusion seem a dirty trick. A
classroom is a sea of language and it is only in the last weeks that I've
been able to drop the term "non-verbal" for "minimally verbal" when
describing my child's abilities. Ben is able to sit quietly in a chair and
let too much stimulation roll over him without any reaction: is inclusion
just a way of saving the school district time and trouble?
As a parent, the answer I have reached is "inclusion? Yes and no, please".
Don't require full inclusion but grow towards it. Including Ben full-time in
a classroom will be the pinnacle of Ben's school experience if we can reach
it. Ben still spends a great part of his day within the resource room
receiving one-on-one lessons that are critical to his education. But Ben
also does one of his independent workbasket sessions within his classroom
while the other students are doing independent work. He plays catch with a
peer as a part of physical therapy during recess. He has a selected peer
group that knows him well and they consider it an honor to be pulled out
occasionally to help Ben work on learning to play with a peer. During his
IEP meetings this year, I am proud that we, as a team, decided to remove the
goal of including him in the standard physical education program because it
was not working. Yet we also included a new goal to try to transfer a
well-established skill into the classroom setting. We have a partial
inclusion program that is working and my child is the winner.
There is no magic to our solution, just a lot of hard work. But as a parent,
I can point out a few elements that I believe were critical to our success.
First, preparation was vital. Ben already shared the same recess and
cafeteria time with all the second-grade students, so they had already been
informally "introduced". Before Ben went into his classroom, Ben's class had
a series of talks that introduced Ben, both his strengths and his
weaknesses. They talked about how each child in the class could be his
friend and what they could do together. Ben's school identified a number of
children in Ben's class as a core peer group. These children could help Ben
work on peer interactions and play skills. Ben visited his classroom when it
was empty to get acclimated. He knew where his desk was and wandered around
the classroom to get comfortable in it.
Another key item was an approach that put Ben's educational goals at a
priority. Ben does not spend any "empty time" in his classroom. We looked
both at the goals in Ben's IEP and at the classroom teacher's daily plan to
identify the activities that could be moved to a classroom. Ben's classroom
teacher had a planned time for independent work, which would be quiet and
yet allow Ben to move independently within the classroom. We targeted that
time for Ben to join with his own work, an independent workbasket system.
Once we identified what to move, we had to tightly plan a transition. The
workbasket system was first modified within his resource room to be a better
fit in the classroom. Once Ben was successful with the changes, he practiced
it within the classroom for weeks while his classmates were attending
"specials". We planned how Ben could fail in that setting and how to
recover. When we finally transitioned Ben to work in the classroom setting,
everyone was ready.
But all of these pieces wouldn't work without Ben's team--his special
education teacher, his aides, his classroom teacher, his principal and his
parents--combining ideas and working out problems. Read back over what I
have written and you will find that I use "we" even for some tasks I was
only peripherally aware of at the time. Perhaps this is the most important
piece of inclusion: making sure everyone feels included in the process.
Reprinted with permission from
Inclusion...Yours, Mine, Ours
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School systems are responsible for assuring that transition planning becomes
a component of the IEP beginning at age 14; however, it may be necessary to
start transition planning much earlier in order to allow the student to
achieve meaningful post-school outcomes. (From the Georgia Department of
Education's Transition Manual) Read more about the topic in the
Roadmap
Transition section. |
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