The power of positive learning
More than 70 per cent of parents feel their children with autism do not receive the necessary support at school, according to a recent survey by Ontario Autism Coalition (OAC). Marisa Brocco was one of those parents. Her quest to find a positive educational environment for her son was long, frustrating, heartbreaking and all-consuming, she says.
Brocco is a working mother. Her income helps pay for the variety of therapies her son, Michael, needs on a regular basis. Michael entered junior kindergarten at age four and a half. He was non-verbal at the time. Once in school, he began to exhibit behaviours never seen at home or at the day care he had attended since the age of two. “Over the course of a year his behaviour went from bad to worse. I was being called by staff every other day to pick him up because they were unable to calm him. It was very stressful and I would frequently end up in tears,” she says. “Because he was only exhibiting these behaviours at school, it became clear the problem was his environment.”
The right school for an individual child with autism may be private, public or a combination of learning environments. “The key is to find a school that is open to as much input as possible from the applied behaviour analysis (ABA) — one where positive behaviour and successes in learning are rewarded. It is also critical that teachers collaborate and communicate with parents often, because consistency is extremely important for these children both in the school setting and at home,” says Bruce McIntosh, founder and past president of OAC and the father of a son with autism and a daughter with Asperger’s. “The most tangible is to find a learning environment where there is acceptance. If the classroom staff have the training and resources they need to support these children, it is less likely to be a disruptive process.”
Thanks to a helping hand from her sister-in-law, Brocco discovered the Lighthouse Learning and Development Centre (LLDC) in Aurora, Ont.
LLDC caters specifically to children diagnosed on the autism spectrum. The school currently has 29 students (27 boys and three girls) ranging from kindergarten to high school. Classes are small, comprising about six students with three adults. Adults include an Ontario-certified teacher with a background in behavioural sciences and two instructor therapists with post-graduate degrees and autism experience.
“The biggest challenge for parents is that others don’t understand that if you have met one child with autism, you have only met one child with autism. Each child is very different. They do not fit into an autism box, because there is no box,” says Serena Thompson, LLDC’s executive director of curriculum. “That’s why, prior to a child even stepping foot into our school, we meet with parents and occupational, physical and speech language therapists. We want to know everything about the child before we meet them.”
Once accepted to the school, an academic and behavioural assessment is done over a five-to-six-week period, she adds. “We spend six hours a day learning what makes them tick, how best to teach them, and what they need. Only then do we begin to develop an individualized learning plan and the optimal learning environment.”
Brocco’s son began attending LLDC in 2015. “Michael is now excited to go to school each day, and I am confident that he is getting a good education. I have no stress, my husband and I can go to work without worry, and we feel as close to being a typical family as we have ever been,” she says.
McIntosh can empathize. “Autism is a big project to land on a parent. The rocks fall on you and you have to rise to the challenge. No one will advocate or help your child more than you, as a parent,” he says. His now-teenage son attends a mainstream classroom at an integrative public school. “He is also a play-by-play announcer for the local junior hockey team, with dreams of a career in sports broadcasting. He’s done marvelously well for a child who wasn’t talking until he was five years old.”
Adds Thompson: “Just because these children learn differently doesn’t mean they lack academic potential. They earn high school diplomas and go on to post-secondary education. Their path may not be as straightforward as it is for others, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be successful.”
Autism is a big project to land on a parent. The rocks fall on you and you have to rise to the challenge. No one will advocate or help your child more than you, as a parent. — Bruce McIntosh, founder and past president, Ontario Autism Coalition