The Challenge of Meeting the High School Rites of Passage When Your Child is Autistic

As if it isn't hard enough for an a child who has autism to fit in with high school it can become doubly challenging to meet the normal high school rites of passage just because of the way the system is set up or run. By the time many kids reach high school the system has relaxed a bit and you'll find that many schools no longer send home those newsletters informing parents of the school's activities and happenings. If you're lucky your school will have a well developed and updated website listing what's going on and deadlines. Unfortunately some schools still lag behind in that area. When the kids reach high school age there is a lot that happens there by word of mouth. Daily announcements and flyers put up around the school keep the
kids informed.

I often found that my son had no idea of many of the big things that were happening at school because his attention was somewhere else when the announcements were going off and he didn't look for or read flyers. As a parent this is incredibly frustrating. I could remind him every single day and even jump up and down and insist but I can't be there at school every day to make sure these things are getting noticed. In hindsight I wonder why it never came up at the IEP meetings. We could have had the speech therapist or case workers question him daily on the announcements and content of posted flyers; that way he would have gotten into the routine of listening and checking them.

I would encourage other parents to do something like this or ask your school, if there is not any newsletter or website, to send home a daily update on school activities. The minutes read over the loudspeaker can be copied and the flyers also can be copied and sent home.

It's really not so much a failure in communication at this stage as a challenge to keep up with the development level of the other kids. When they enter High School they are given more responsibility to pay attention and get things done on their own. The schools relax and expect kids to be listening to announcements, reading flyers and looking for and seeking out their own activities that they want to participate in. With an autistic teen these simple things can become a challenge and intermediatory measures may have to be taken so our kids can enjoy and take part in school activities to their fullest ability and not let deadlines slip by unnoticed.