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Autism presents challenges
The Vindicator (Youngstown)
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Sean Barron, center, shares his experiences of growing up with autism with Derrick Lind of Struthers, left, and Derrick’s mother, Chrissy.
The Ohio Department of Education’s Office for Exceptional Children says there are several resources available through the state for school districts’ staff and parents who deal with autistic children. They include:
The Ohio Coalition for the Education of Children with Disabilities in Marion, Ohio. The coalition offers training sessions and workshops. Call 800-374-2806, for parents, ext. 20, Martha Lause.
The state’s parent-mentor program. A mentor would be hired by a school district. Call the Office for Exceptional Children for more information at 614-466-2650.
The Ohio Center for Autism and Low Incidence provides development and training for teachers and parents. At OCALI, Donna Owens works with programs for parents. Chris Filler works on transition issues. Call 866-886-2254.
Schools themselves can be an important resource for autism awareness, said Barry Mahanes, an educational consultant on low-incidence disabilities and autism with the Office for Exceptional Children. He suggests that because April is Autism Awareness Month, it would be a good idea to conduct anti-bullying assemblies focusing on issues that affect people with the disorder.
Source: The Ohio Department of Education’s Office for Exceptional Children
Editor’s note: The Autism Society established April as National Autism Awareness Month in the 1970s to educate the public about the condition.
By Jeanne Starmack
STRUTHERS
Sean Barron and a classmate could have been friends decades ago if Barron’s autism hadn’t gotten in the way.
Derrick Lind faces the same challenge in school today. With a little help, however, he can work around his own, mild form of autism and find the friends he deserves.
More than three decades separate the two in age; Derrick is 15, and Barron is 49. But their experiences, as they discovered when they met last week to talk about them, are timeless.
At Derrick’s grandfather’s house on Frank Street in Struthers, Barron remembered the boy who sat behind him in seventh- and eighth-grade homeroom. The boy seemed friendly when they first met — and Barron doesn’t think he rebuffed him.
“I just didn’t respond well, and he got mean,” he remembered.
For the next two years, the boy tormented him — going so far as to poke him on the side of his leg with a pen, leaving a welt.
It was just one in a string of unhappy episodes for Barron, who had autism severe enough to impair his social skills throughout his childhood and adolescence.
He has chronicled many of those painful memories in his book, “Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries through the Unique Perspectives of Autism,” which he co-wrote with noted scientist Temple Grandin.
Not much was known about autism when he was young.
The disorder that can cause repetitive behaviors and a seeming lack of emotion, even toward parents, was first blamed on cold, distant “refrigerator mothers.”
Barron writes in “Unwritten Rules” that the doctor who diagnosed his autism in 1965 told his parents that he was destined to live in an institution. But Barron got through mainstream classes in the Boardman School District, moving to California when he was 16. He moved back to this area several years later, and he now lives in Poland while he pursues a career as a writer and a Vindicator correspondent.
His parents never gave up on him, he writes, despite the doctor’s grim prediction. Together they worked on the intricacies of social relationships, and he believes he “emerged” from autism gradually over the years. He has many rewarding social relationships now, he says. But the path to them was overgrown with frustration and misunderstandings.
Today, there are more resources for autistic children, and their mothers aren’t being blamed for the disorder — autistic brains are just different. Autism also is a spectrum disorder, meaning that it affects people to varying degrees.
Derrick, a ninth-grader in the Struthers School District, has the milder form of autism called Asperger syndrome.
In February, Derrick tried to make a friend in the lunchroom.
“I tried to be nice to this kid, and he punched me in the stomach,” Derrick remembered.
The boy was sitting at a lunch table. Derrick came up behind his chair and stood “a few inches” away. He tried to say “hi.” He got a backhand in the stomach.
“They said Derrick provoked him,” Derrick’s mother, Chrissy Lind, explained.
In early March, Derrick tried to befriend a girl in one of his classes. He said “hi” to her, then she threatened to “shank” him. When Chrissy complained to the school district, they told her the girl reported he was standing too close to her.
But Derrick doesn’t understand. He tries to be nice, he said. Why did he get blamed after he was punched and threatened? His confusion is understandable, Barron says.
“That’s very common with teens with Asperger’s,” he said, adding that they are socially aware, but don’t know how to use social skills. Chrissy said her son often is on the receiving end of hostility and ridicule, and the threatened “shanking” was the beginning of a downward spiral.
“He was crying,” Chrissy said. “He didn’t feel safe.”
He spent several days at Akron Children’s Hospital in Boardman after he couldn’t stop throwing up at the thought of having to go back to school. The hospital’s diagnosis: severe anxiety.
After he was released, he still did not return to school. He spent four weeks at a day program at Belmont Pines, the children’s behavioral health hospital in Liberty Township.
“I hear, ‘Teachers are helping him,’” Chrissy said during that time. “Then why is my son out of school for a week throwing up?”
Chrissy said school staff have told her they don’t see the bullying. She said that after the “shanking” threat, a teacher role-played with Derrick and believed the problem was solved.
Derrick is mainstreamed, she said, because he is considered too high-functioning for special classes all day — federal and state laws require appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.
He is assigned to a special- education teacher, and a counselor who is not affiliated with the school district comes to their house.
Schools Superintendent Robert Rostan said he cannot discuss Derrick’s case specifically because of privacy laws.
Students with special needs have IEPs, or individual education plans, he said. Those plans are established by a team that includes parents, teachers and other education professionals.
IEPs, he said, address academic rather than social skills.
“In the structure of a classroom, teachers work on other life and social skills,” he said.
Chrissy said she has considered home-schooling her son.
“They said home-schooling wouldn’t be good for his social skills,” she said.
But at school, she pointed out, Derrick gets 25 minutes of socialization at lunch with two friends. “And then people are making fun of him,” she said.
Chrissy met with Derrick’s IEP team April 4, and the school ended up shuffling his schedule so he would not have to take his classes with the same kids, some of whom bullied him. His first day back to school was April 6, and he said it went OK.
He would still rather be home-schooled next year. Chrissy told him, though, that she’s leaning toward keeping him in school. She’s heartened by a plan the district now has to start transition classes for special- education students to prepare them for life after graduation.
Derrick has some work to do though, she acknowledged, on becoming more aware of body language. Barron pointed out it’s a key player in social interactions.
Barron went over one unwritten social rule Derrick needs to keep in mind — keep at least two or three feet between yourself and someone else while you’re out in public. Standing too close behind someone’s chair, he said, “makes the hair on their neck stand on end.”
But society has some work to do as well to meet Derrick half-way.
“Learn more about me,” he said. “Who I am — who I’m not. I’m a nice person.”