Mary, it's not necessarily a matter of turning your home into a police state. What we have found, is that by allowing the students more control over what to work on and for how long, the student becomes the driving force and all I have to do is keep the education bus steering straight.
Online lessons are brilliant - difficult child 3's correspondence school is increasingly using these. However, there is a school for him, it's based in the heart of Sydney's CBD (a little oasis down near the navy docks). There are teachers there he can telephone and they have study days about once a month (sometimes more often) where we can choose to go and participate.
Although it's mostly difficult child's work, I am still needed as supervisor (not teacher). difficult child 3 could take himself in to the study days alone - difficult child 1 used to - but I go too, because on these days I function as an aide. I have also seen the way the teachers work as a team, on study days, often one will step in and sit with difficult child 3 if I'm not there (I could be in a meeting, for example). I can also request individual tuition sessions (we organised a lot for difficult child 1).
Otherwise, what we do is very similar to home schooling.
As the work gets more complex (and beyond my ability to teach/help) my role changes to one of facilitator. I don't teach, I let the curriculum material do that. But I do help with essay-writing skills, for example. The Special Education staffer at the correspondence school sent me a fabulous link for students to use in any type of writing task - it is like a template that can shift depending on what sort of task is needed.
Here it is:
http://www.writingfun.com/
I help my child follow the template. I show my child how to use a mind map, and we practise this over and over. I also keep my eyes peeled for opportunities to get out and about, but still learn.
Social skills - I strongly feel, in our case, that difficult child 3's social skills are MUCH better taught OUT of mainstream. The situation was so bad, that all that was happening for difficult child 3 in mainstream was BAD social interaction. He was learning the wrong social skills (how to hit someone; how to shout at people; how to be a bully) instead of positive skills. He also had less time for healthy social interaction while he was in mainstream; he would be sent home with loads of homework, form all the work he didn't complete during the day. This happened actually with difficult child 1 as well.
The result in mainstream - the boys would get home from school, tired, angry and sometimes bleeding. They then had to settle down to do homework, which required my ongoing supervision, support and nagging. It took hours, went well into the night, aggravated because their medications had worn off and they took much longer to do what should have been easy. With difficult child 1 I was medicating him with extra, short-acting medications as he walked in the door and he would keep working until 10 pm or more. It was purgatory.
Working at home - the student gets to work on schoolwork when school hours begin. If he's still not dressed or breakfasted, so what? He works anyway. He can get dressed at recess. He can eat his meals while working. And we found that the work got done much faster, more efficiently and to a greater extent, than either at mainstream or after hours. Result - school hours finished, most of the work was also finished. Far more work completed per day at home than ever was done in a week at school. So when school hours finish - he's free to go socialise with friends. Or go to a class in something with other kids. Or go play a team sport somewhere. Or come shopping with me.
In summary - mainstream, the kid was miserable, bullied and learning bad interaction habits at school then having to come home and do more work to make up for what he hadn't done during the day. No good social contact happening. Out of mainstream - the work gets done, then after school he has MORE freedom than other kids.
The social contact at school - the kids are stuck there. If someone is being mean, they can't walk away because the bullies will often follow them. Telling a teacher often backfires. But after hours - if difficult child 3 visits a friend, and someone is mean to him - he can walk out of there and come home. Even THAT is a good social skill.
Of course it depends on the child, on the range of social opportunities available, etc. Also on how good is the mainstream setting you can access.
A close friend of ours has chosen to pull her boys out of the local school and home-school them. These boys are PCs, bright and talented. There was no real reason for her to do this other than her own social mores being very different. She's a pacifist, a vegetarian, a New Age hippie raising her boys in her mould. Their hair has never been cut, for example. Her eldest looks like a girl, but was still accepted by the other boys at his school despite his waist-length blonde curls and delicate features. Her kids were fending for themselves. But she decided she wanted more freedom and more control over what they were taught.
Socially, her boys are doing well. They still play with schoolfriends more freely, if anything, because they don't have homework (the biggest advantage of home schooling). They get to see a lot of people across a wide spectrum of social strata. They have a self-confidence when it comes to speaking to people of all ages and walks of life.
I'm seeing similar things with difficult child 3 - he is confident when it comes to speaking to people. He did the bulk of his Christmas shopping entirely unaided, he did a lot of comparison shopping to get the best deal, he negotiated discounts where he felt it was warranted, he will willingly ask for help form a shopkeeper and will also help a total stranger if he sees that help is needed. He is polite to strangers, courteous (often too chatty). And when it's a bit too much for him, he has a key to get into the car and will go back there to take a break. That is something he was not able to do at school and he needed to. Knowing he needed to but couldn't was aggravating his stress levels. Knowing now that he can, actually makes it easier for him to soldier on.
It deeply concerns me, that so many people hear "home schooling" and IMMEDIATELY think "The child will suffer for lack of social interaction."
It's a myth. It's wrong. Especially with a child on the autism spectrum, mainstream alone DOES NOT TEACH SOCIAL SKILLS. Mainstream is NOT a natural social environment, and while "normal" kids can eventually pick up social skills in a mainstream setting, they will pick those skills up anywhere simply because they ARE normal, their brains are designed to understand it all far more naturally.
I'm going to have this printed onto a t-shirt -
AUTISTIC KIDS DO NOT LEARN SOCIAL SKILLS BY OSMOSIS.
You can't surround an autistic kid with lots of other kids and expect them to absorb social skills. It's BECAUSE it doesn't work that way for them, that we need to actively teach social skills to autistic kids. We rehearse, we role-play, we write social stories, we arrange practice sessions, we go out in public and stand back to watch how well they put into practice what they have learned.
As a supervisor of a correspondence student, I now have him under my nose much more and therefore have more opportunity to directly do all this, to see how well he is learning.
It does vary a lot, from child to child and from situation to situation.
People also get the chicken-or-egg situation backwards. They meet difficult child 3 and when they learn that he is home-schooled, they say to themselves, "THAT is why he is socially odd; it's because he is socially isolated. Homeschooling is bad for socialising." but in fact difficult child 3 is still socially backward BECAUSE he is autistic. He is as advanced as he is, because we work at socialising. In mainstream he was far more backward; partly because he was younger, mostly because he was not being taught anything constructive.
it's up to the child - what sort of schooling do you want? Do you want the freedom to work in comfort and do your best in a distraction-free environment that is under your control, or do you want to go back to mainstream?
And some kids will choose mainstream and probably do much better there.
But some won't. Given the choice, I know I would have learned a much better work ethic, much sooner, if I'd been home-schooled.
difficult child 3 is doing much better now. People ask us when we'll be sending him back to mainstream. For him - never. Not until university.
But that's us.
Marg