Category: Story
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Don’t punish us for being autistic
Schools punishing students with autism for running (elopement) is sad. I was a runner when young. Please know that it is not to misbehave, but rather to escape the experience of autism’s confusing world. Your world is bearable, but ours is often jumpy or noisy or spinning. Running and feeling air swirling about can help…
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Our Road to Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC)
When I think back to the long road that we’ve been down when it comes to augmentative and alternative communication and using an AAC device, it’s unreal. When a speech-language pathologist (SLP) tells you that it will take a child 2-3 years to begin to grasp this new language, much like learning any language during…
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Abused and unable to tell your parents
Imagine being unable to talk for a single day. Unable to express your needs. You can’t write or text. Stop reading this and take 30 seconds to truly grasp how difficult and stressful it would be to go through a single day without any traditional means of communication.
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No laws in Nebraska, leads to abuse of seclusion and restraint
Our nation’s schools use seclusion rooms for students as young as five-years old. They don’t call them that of course. It doesn’t sound nice to call them what they are. They sometimes call them alternative learning rooms. Let me pose a question here – how much ‘learning’ can take place in a padded room with…
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The healing power of cooking
Our son Cole was born fifteen years ago with Down syndrome, and I often say that when he came into this world, he flipped our world upside down in the best possible way. Cole has always been a compassionate, good-natured, and funny guy. He has taught us more lessons than I can possibly recount. But…
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I kept screaming that I can’t breathe
My trauma started at 2 years old after my parents divorced when my dad would beat me. Having a trauma background, I was 6 years old in the second half of kindergarten, as I had gotten kicked out of the last school I went to that couldn’t deal with me, where I was first secluded…
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Locked in the safe room
I was hospitalized 13 times during my childhood. It has to be well over 500 times I was restrained but I honestly could not tell you it was that much and that bad. Once I was stripped down naked and given a paper top by male staff while an inpatient and then locked in one…
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“It hurts, please let go” stories of restraint and seclusion in North Dakota
enforcement or SROs in the school setting that may not be credentialed to work with kids. I am concerned that there is zero representation of tracking circumstances for these children charged by SROs or School Districts that address specifically the lack of fidelity to the legal binding contract of the child’s IEP (Individual Educational Plan)…
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Nonspeaking Student Restrained 33 Times Without Report To Parents
Remember that feeling you had the first day you left your helpless, months-old baby at daycare? That anguished, groveling, fear? How you needed to believe, so desperately, in the goodness of people, in their ability to be gentle, patient, and honest? Imagine feeling that every day for 13 years, and then imagine someone, or maybe…
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My Child Can’t Talk. How Will I Know if Someone’s Hurting Him at School?
My son is autistic and has a significant intellectual disability. He attends middle school in a self-contained classroom. Recently, we learned that one of his classmates was physically restrained by staff 33 times in a period of 8 weeks — at least once to the point of unconsciousness — without report to the child’s parents.…