This morning we visited the Autism Academy on in Gilbert, AZ. We had a private tour guided by the Principal, Derrick Jamerson. He is very kind, and took a lot of time out of his day showing us around and answering the never ending questions that we had. It looks like Ezra misses the cut off date to start kindergarten by 10 days. So that means next year when he starts he will be one of the older kids in his class.
This school has only been around for 5 years. It started off with one campus and 22 kids, and now it has a few campuses; this Gilbert campus alone has 120 kids. The autism academy now goes all the way through 12th grade, which means the kids can graduate high school from here. As they try to accommodate the different ranges in the kids abilities (for those unfamiliar with autism, the ranges are endless), they do have 3 different groups within the same age ranges. In the first group, the children may still be struggling with matching letters or numbers and responding to simple questions. The third group the kids have a better grasp with socialization and excel academically (maybe gifted), the second group (those of you with a touch of autism just got annoyed that I went out of order) is everyone in between that is still working on socialization but have a good grasp academically. As the classes have a 4 student to 1 teacher ratio, the classes themselves can be divided up into different abilities. This was actually very nice to see as these children's capabilities can differ so much.
We had gone to an open house for the Autism Academy a few weeks ago and met Ms. Yvonne Hernandez and Ms. Taylor Bates. Ezra would most likely be in one of their classes. Ms. Yvonne teaches the higher functioning class, and Ms. Taylor teaches the moderate class. They were both very friendly, and they both seem to really love the children that they work with. When we walked into Ms. Yvonnes class this morning, the children were in a semi-circle watching an educational cartoon with music and captioned phrases across the bottom. Ms. Yvonne encouraged them to dance with the music, which some of them did, Ezra would have LOVED that. She waved and spoke to us as she remembered us from the open house. The lights in the room were turned off, but of course they were watching a video; but throughout all of the classrooms the lights were a little dim or turned off. They mostly relied on natural light or the lights were covered with a colored sheet lessen the intensity of the lights. At home a couple years ago we replaced all our light bulbs from the CFL bulbs that we had back to the old tungsten bulbs that are going out of style. It is said to be a myth that humans are affected by these lights since the CFL ones flicker 10,000 or more per second and the human brain can't recognize the flickers, but it seemed to help Ezra to have them changed. Ezra appeared to get irritated and get very distracted by those types of lights. Anyway, back to the Autism Academy. When we entered Ms. Taylor's classroom, the children were all divided up into groups of 3-4 and a teacher with each group. It looked like a couple of the groups were learning to draw or write. I saw one child drawing a stick figure on his desk with his marker. It was quiet, and if someone observed this room briefly they probably would not notice the children were autistic. But it seemed like the children were all being attended to and no one left out.
Principal Derrick made some comments which I would like to note:
Although he does not know if every child really understands what autism is, it is not hidden from them that they have autism. They embrace it there. He pointed out that it is the same as me having glasses, that it doesn't make me strange, it is just something that makes me unique, just a characteristic.
The children at this school appear to be a little more accepting of each other than maybe compared to a regular public school because they may have similar struggles, they all see each other have melt downs at some point, and their mannerisms are not looked at as weird or different.
Many children have come to this school because they did not fit in wherever they were previously. They may have been affected by bullying, being left out of groups, and even never invited to birthday parties.
They do not hold kids back grades. That is why there are different levels of capabilities that are divided up. They do not want to have older kids intermingled with younger kids mostly due to their self esteem. Some children academically may take a very long time to get past a typical third grade level, but that doesn't mean that they will be 21 years old and still in third grade.
Academically the children are across the board. With the different classes and different groups within the classes the children can progress more easily at their own level. That is one of our concerns as Ezra is behind socially compared to a typical peer, but academically he has been reading, writing, and of course his specialty, memorizing, ahead of what a typical peer could do.
All in all, we did like this school. We did see a couple meltdowns (very expected as this is a school for autistic children). For those of you unfamiliar with autism, a meltdown can come in different forms and the more apparent one is inconsolable screaming and crying. One meltdown was in the lower functioning classroom, it looked like the other kids just moved away and gave the child space to scream on the ground, didn't seem like anyone was giving any strange looks or looked panicky. This may be strange to those that do not know someone with autism, but these screaming bouts can happen when something (sometimes known sometimes unknown) triggers. This does not happen as much at our house as it used to as we know Ezra's triggers and we can mostly keep him from getting set off. We saw a child in one of the older classroom, maybe 4th grade that seemed to be crying about not knowing the answers to questions on maybe an exam he was taking. He was walked out of the classroom until he calmed down. The meltdowns seemed like they were handled as good as anyway that I could think of. The children seemed cared for and there seemed to be a place for everyone on the autism spectrum. We were pleased.
