Adam Cox didn’t get his high school diploma last Saturday.

Instead, on graduation day, the Erwin High senior received a “certificate of achievement” or something like that as his fellow students stood and cheered, and robed graduation officials shook his hand and patted him on the back.

Meanwhile, the State Board of Education held fast to its decision to deny a diploma to any student who fails the state competency test.

But Adam isn’t just any student.

Diagnosed with a brain tumor when he was 3 years old, Adam has always excelled in school and has never failed a course. But he failed the math portion of the state competency test by five points, enough to deny him a diploma.

“When you take this test and fail it by five points, it’s like the state is saying you’re stupid,” Adam said on a television report.

A bill currently in the General Assembly would give principals the authority to consider a student’s overall work instead of final test scores. But no matter what happens, it won’t erase the memory Adam has of his graduation ceremony, when he received a certificate branding him as inferior to everybody else.

As a teacher, I am certainly touched and angered by Adam’s story. As a parent, I am profoundly worried about the educational future of my own son, Robert. He is 6 years old, bright-eyed, intelligent, witty, adorable, curious and fascinated with nature.

He talks frequently about becoming a zoo or museum keeper.

Robert is also high-functioning autistic, a diagnosis that conjures up images of all kinds of anti-social and self-destructive behavior, none of which apply to him. Sure, I’ve become accustomed to the stares at his hand-flapping or the perplexed looks at his apparently nonsensical phrases.

But it’s difficult to accept any insensitivity from a school board or administration that doesn’t know the first thing about autism. Robert has already encountered it, and he hasn’t even started first grade yet.

I should point out that Robert is lucky to attend public school in North Carolina. The Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children (TEACCH) program has been established statewide, enabling autistic children to learn in an environment with instructors trained in autistic education. North Carolina has come a long way since the days of labeling autistic children as “disabled” and tossing them into the one special education class.

The TEACCH program has worked wonderfully for Robert. His autistic classroom prepared him for kindergarten, which he attended with a trained caregiver. With the help of dedicated teachers and assistants, Robert completed a year of kindergarten and walked across the stage to receive his “diploma” with all of the other students.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that not all school administrators are on the same page.
Robert brought home a slip in early May asking if we wanted to transfer him to a new autistic classroom at a new school. We were asked to complete a “statement of intent,” which actually consisted of checking the appropriate box, one school or the other.

The slip also informed us that transportation would only be provided to the school nearest us, which meant that Robert could no longer ride the special bus that picked him up each morning and took him to school on the other side of the county.

I guess that means I’ll drive him to school each morning, because I don’t intend to take him out of the school and environment he loves. But transportation, despite being a major concern, isn’t what really disturbed my wife and me.

Autistic children are extremely dependent on routine and familiarity. It took a while for Robert to build up confidence in the public school environment, but with the comfort of his schedules, close attention from trained and concerned teachers and friendships he began to develop, Robert blossomed from a developmentally delayed toddler to a confident little boy.

I can’t understand how a school district that could include a wonderful program like TEACCH and recognize the needs of autistic children could just as easily split up an autistic classroom in the name of saving transportation costs and filling desks in a new school. A parent who cannot provide transportation for an autistic child must place that child in a totally new environment. Trust me when I say that not all autistic children are high functioning. Any little bit of progress becomes so precious. Possibly delaying that progress in the name of administrative efficiency makes no sense.

I wonder why the slip that Robert brought home never mentioned how many teachers at the new school would be trained in autistic education. It makes a difference in the final decision of where to send an autistic child.

It makes me fearful for what lies ahead. If administrators who make decisions on children with special needs ignore those needs and make no exceptions to their decisions, can I count on everyone understanding Robert’s weaknesses in a standardized testing situation? Yes, I want my son to mainstream into the regular classroom environment, but I also know that autistic children see the world much differently than “normal” people.

Robert has the knowledge. Will he always have instructors able to recognize it? What will happen when he leaves the secure educational environment we have found? If North Carolina cannot fully recognize the differences and special needs of autistic children, what will happen when we move to another state with less available opportunities? Why are people not trained in autistic education making decisions regarding my son’s educational future?

They are questions that haunt a concerned parent who knows that the road of education isn’t always paved with common sense. But I know Adam Cox will do fine. I think he should pursue a career in school administration. A little 6-year-old boy I know might thank him for it someday.

(Karl Rohr teaches history at Western Carolina University. He can be reached at rohr@wcu.edu)

 

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