[senco-forum] exclude or not?

Hi Amanda - Just to clarify : you have taken my comment about 'contempt for
people with an ASD' out of context - I wasn't referring to your question.
The comment I was referring to was someone else's.  It reminded me somewhat
about how company directors used to complain about women in the workplace
(and sometimes still do when they think nobody is listening).  "They go
around getting pregnant all over the place and then we have to put up with
them puking up and taking time off - AND we have to pay them after it's
popped while they sit around doing nothing all day ."  Fortunately, times
change.

You'll have to forgive me for saying that the problem with many schools is
that they THINK they know autism.  Sadly, they do not. A school that
understands would not talk about 'having made allowances', it would be
talking with compassion about 'strategies' - how to deal with the inevitable
fallout, how to deal with having put your foot in it bigtime AGAIN!  How to
'be in the world' WITH his disability.  An exclusion does not add to his
skills, but learning how and when and in what way to apologise just might...
You can't STOP him being who he is, even if you don't like who he is.

He may well be evicted, barred or banned out in the big world.  Or he may
choose not to go to places where that might be the outcome.  He may find
friends or guides who will help him out in such situations. He may find the
emotional strength to handle constant rejection for being who he is.  Or he
may lose every job he ever has and end up lonely, isolated and known as the
weird smelly man who lives on the streets and shouts at everybody who comes
near him.

If this young man is due to leave at the end of the year, go out into the
workplace for the first time in June, why would the school want to send him
off with a failure reverberating in his ears in April?  How does that help
him get off to a good start?  What does that say about the priorities of the
school?  I wonder what the school mission statement says that might help you
solve this problem??  Don't give up on him.

Everyone with an ASD needs an interpreter to cope in our society and for our
society to cope with them.  None of us asked for it, but that's the deal.
After all, most people with an ASD would much rather stay home out of
everybody's way but it's we who insist they sit in a classroom and then go
out and earn a living and force them to be amongst other people.  I'm sure
Sartre had an ASD (L'enfer, c'est l'autre!)

Our world is changing in its understanding - although much of current
'understanding' is based on stereotypes - so we have a way to go as yet.
But once you truly know the confusion and fear that goes on behind the
curtain of an ASD, you'd find a heap of compassion, even whilst
acknowledging they get on your nerves and make you feel angry and totally
unappreciated and like you don't exist.

But whilst WE are experiencing those emotions, THEY did not inflict them -
how's that for a paradox! Yet the desire to ban him is a result of those
very real feelings - of staff anger, frustration, indignation and
impotence.  But I think if staff understood this complicated paradoxical
transaction, they wouldn't feel the need to exclude.  Can you help them do
that?  You have a lot of influence (even if it doesn't always feel that
way!) as the school's expert on SEN .

I have great respect for Ruth's experience but the issue of the example set
to other pupils is a red herring.  He gets different treatment because he
has a disability.  Being afraid of giving the other kids 'ideas' isn't a
reason to discriminate against a child with a disability. How would you deal
with a child who has Tourettes and uses foul language?  (Back to company
directors and women employees having babies!  "It shouldn't be allowed.
Whenever one goes off on maternity leave, you can guarantee she's followed
by three others.")

I realise that this is a challenging post and I have no desire to be roasted
alive, but I hope something helpful will be taken from it.

Astryngia
Adult child of, spouse of, mother of people with an ASD
Former chair of this, that and the other
Leading light in curriculum development (when learning was in vogue)
And a few other things ;-)