Your son could be my son. difficult child 3 is hyperlexic and autistic. IQ difficult to measure, rough estimate 145. Splinter skills but currently doing well with the more difficult, 'waffly' subjects. Recent English assignment - he wrote pages of poetry, on demand! Best haiku I've seen in a long while. Well ahead of grade in maths, science & technology.
We also considered getting him into a Special Education class for slower kids. I campaigned for it, as an alternative to mainstream which I knew was not working. They refused to let him go into the Special Education class because he was too bright - he needed an IQ score below 100. Preferably below 90. I suggested the Special Education class with accelerated/assisted learning combo. They said, too labour intensive. Personally, I don't agree - a Distance Ed program in this class would work well for him.
We've since met another couple of students in this class (they attend difficult child 3's extracurricular drama class for local disabled kids). They're nice kids. But the academic standard - difficult child 3 would get very frustrated with them, as he does at drama. Because he's such a prolific reader and communicator (he's caught up, after severe language delay to begin with) he would get frustrated with a classmate who has only just learned to read and is enjoying very basic stuff - Miffy, Salli Malli, Bananas in Pajamas, Bob the Builder. difficult child 3 reads "Harry Potter".
A teacher of this class is also a good friend of mine, she also knows difficult child 3 very well. She agrees that he needs to be out of mainstream, but her class wouldn't work either.
I campaigned for a Special Education class specifically for local high-functioning autistic kids (and Aspies) who can't cope in full-time mainstream. The class is up and running I'm told, but with no place for difficult child 3, since others need it even more than we do. I have the option of home schooling him and it is the best thing we ever did. Absolutely! Far and away, why the H*** didn't they let me do this before!??! If you can do it, then do it. We actually use a version of mainstream education called Distance Education - it's for kids who can't physically attend mainstream due to distance (Australia is a big country and outback it gets isolated very quickly, and schools are too far to get to if you live way out of town); due to being physically ill (a kid with severe allergies or asthma problems); socially unable to cope (school phobia, agoraphobia, autism); and kids who are athletes or performers in training. We have the option of a modified academic program, which difficult child 3 had in some subjects last year; or full-on mainstream, which I nagged them to give him this year. We have strict rules which he follows (mostly) - "school work during school hours" being the big one. I believe in the Us you have access to internet-based education. It might be worth a look, at least.
But what about social interaction, I hear you cry? Trust me, the sort of social interaction they get in mainstream school is NOT natural, and often is NOT positive. difficult child 3 gets plenty of more valid social interaction. Think about it - a big group of kids, all about the same age and with ONE adult at the helm, sitting in a room all working on the same work at the same time - where does this occur in real life? But taking difficult child 3 shopping - he meets a wide age range of people, much more representative of life in general. He interacts with them by chatting to a total stranger, cooing over a baby in a pram, buying something from a shopkeeper (and learning to manage the interaction appropriately, as well as the money) and following a shopping list. He also learns to help me find the most economic tin of baked beans (maths skills, economic skills, business and marketing, as well as personal organisation).
The schools basically did their best to keep difficult child 3 in mainstream. We were actively discouraged from trying anything else - in fact, we were not told of alternatives, I had to find out for myself. We were also brainwashed into believing that it was OK for the school to have the same behaviour requirements for difficult child 3 as well as the same punishments. It is not. Our kids need delicate and very different handling. Staff members who couldn't accept this were sometimes very nice people, but they did a lot of damage in their attempts to shape him into a 'normal' mould. He ended up being held back in maths and as a result lost a lot of his confidence in his prodigious ability (and lost a lot of that ability as well). He was never rewarded or congratulated for his talents - he was left and forgotten, most of the time. He had an aide who was brilliant, but the class members and the teacher treated him as the idiot baby brother who should be sitting quietly up the back of the room. Socially he could not join in with the other kids because he didn't have the social understanding to adapt the way kids his age generally do. A game has strict rules, in his mind. Kids will change the rules as they play, to accommodate changing conditions. The goal posts will move, and difficult child 3 couldn't accept this and labelled it cheating. Kids wouldn't want to play with him and would sometimes change the rules just to get him out - he resented this because he knew what they were up to. When he threw a tantrum, HE would be the one in trouble. When he tried to stay calm and tell a teacher, he was told to sort it out for himself, or choose to not lay with kids who changed the rules. You can't do this to an autistic kid, and not suffer the consequences in schools.
We changed schools with difficult child 3, while he was still in mainstream. The new school had a great deal of playground support for him, but the gaps we found convinced us that mainstream could never work for him. Unless ALL the staff were thoroughly on the same page, mistakes happened and the meltdowns were becoming increasingly violent. It was easy to work out what went wrong after the event; much harder to put strategies in place to prevent. When we knew we couldn't prevent, we pulled him out.
What we found at home - we know he had been exposed to the full curriculum, but despite being hyperlexic he had not learnt anything beyond his maths. What he had learnt of his maths was self-taught. When we examined everything - it was ALL self-taught, or leant at home on various computer games. Here was a boy of 11, with no concept of basic geography for example. No understanding of words like "narrative", "personification", "conflict", "resolution". He understood the mechanics of language - "noun", "verb", "adjective" but little else. What he knew, I had taught him. And this is after 6 years of public school education, where he had been bringing home stellar report cards (at least in terms of academic achievement). He could easily do a comprehension exercise because it's just word-finding skills, at that level. (look for the key word). He basically had wasted his entire years of schooling.
So we had to give him crash courses in the basics. A lot of it he's having to learn on the fly, and when we find a big deficit we put the current worksheets on hold while we give him the lessons he's missed. It's crazy - he watches the educational stuff on TV and is enjoying the senior high school organic chemistry programs, he can discuss organic chemistry with an adult expert. But he is still learning basic geography.
Much of what he is learning, he is doing entirely by himself. Although I'm supposed to help him he refuses to let me "because that's cheating". He has teachers in the city, available on the phone, he will telephone them for advice but won't take my word for it without their confirmation. I've got to not let that get to me - it's good to be cautious and to double-check things.
To learn his geography we bought a copy of "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" Not exactly good curriculum but it was a BIG start. Before that, he couldn't find Australia or the US on a globe. We'd go for an afternoon drive and he would be asking if we were close to London yet. Going away on holidays was a nightmare - to get anywhere in Australia, you drive for a very long time. Our first holiday, we took two full days to drive to the Victorian Alps. The land was so different there, he thought we were in another country and would never get home.
Eleanor, your son does well at home. You and your husband clearly have something in place which works for your son. The school does not. Even the best school in the world, sometimes cannot help kids like ours. Drugs may help to calm him at school, but drugs are really not the answer, when he's already doing OK for you at home. Often the problem is anxiety in the school environment - you COULD drug him into oblivion, or give him a smaller dose so he can cope a little better, but it's a band-aid, it won't fix the underlying problem, which is that the mainstream environment is too stressful for him and THEY'RE not sufficiently accepting of him.
The problems at school that you can't fix:
the other kids - they produce noise, chaos, distraction. At best. At worse they tease, they bully (and get away with it) and generally torment to get the autistic kid into trouble. It takes an observant and dedicated teacher to put a stop to it.
The teachers - they have their fixed ideas, they do NOT have to deal with these kids outside school hours, they have to maintain standards of behaviour for the whole school, they have to keep some semblance of order and discipline.
The rapid change in topics being covered each day - at 9 am the class is given some worksheets in English. difficult child 3 fidgets, can't find his pencil, it needs sharpening, can't settle to his work because Sandra is sniffing and Steven is kicking his table leg. Even with an aide, by the time difficult child 3 gets down to work the rest of the class are done and it is now 9.30 am, time to change to another subject. But difficult child 3 wants to finish what he's working on - a fight ensues. By the time difficult child 3 has settled down to accept the new work, the rest of the class have finished and they're ready for the next subject. And so t he day progresses. But at home - it's 9 am, time to begin work. OK, he might fuss around for up to half an hour, choosing which subject to do, finding his pen and so on, But when he begins work he continues until it is done. It might take until lunchtime, but the work is done. And for him, it is a week's work in that subject. After lunch, he begins a new worksheet. By the end of the day, he's made good progress on a second subject (or maybe even finished it). No homework needed. School finishes and he goes out to play with friends.
The size of the classroom - it also produces many distraction factors. the noise is the worst - our kids concentrate better when they can tune out the noise. We provided difficult child 3 with a CD player which he would listen to while he did his worksheets.
The visual distraction factor - movement between the student and the teaching focus of the classroom is a huge problem. Sometimes it just isn't possible for this to be sufficiently minimised.
The vibrations - a chair scraping, a bump on the wall, feet tramping on the floor - all distract. It's like you or me trying to write a letter while someone is drumming their fingers on our back.
The teachers and kids in other classes - they really don't know how to cope with a difficult child, these people tend to be conservative, fearful and highly reactive. This can set off a difficult child in unfavourable ways. He will get substitute teachers, other teachers on playground duty, encountering changes of teachers for all sorts of reasons. Unless each one is trained and briefed, chances are the encounters will cause problems.
And in all of this - a negative experience for a kid with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) can unsettle them for days or longer. It depends on the experience and the degree of impact. It's taken difficult child 3 years to unlearn about hitting kids. He learnt it by observation in mainstream school - t he teachers SAY "don't hit," but he sees that other boys DO hit and get away with it (because the teacher is not watching). So the public rules are different to the private rules. But when HE hits - the kids tell on him. Why? But when he doesn't hit - the other kids hit him, or cheek him, or are mean to him. he also learnt that he couldn't trust his own observations - a number of times he came home injured and told me that he'd been tripped, or hit with a stick. When I reported it, difficult child 3 was told that things really hadn't happened that way because the boy he'd named had denied it, so difficult child 3 must have been mistaken. difficult child 3 was learning that he would be punished, for doing exactly what the other boys were doing. This must be because difficult child 3 was bad, or in some other way deserving of punishment. He never understood why, not really. Therefore the punishment was never appropriate nor effective.
We now have a happy, cooperative and eager-to-learn bright young man. he is polite to people we meet, helpful, courteous and kind. But put him in a group of young boys and it CAN turn nasty. I'v e watched - generally it's the other boys trying to get him to react. Slowly he's learning to cope, and as his peer group get older they are also getting more understanding, but he needs watching still, for his own safety. And in school, nobody can watch him closely enough.
So if you can't pull him out, try and find him somewhere appropriate to his needs AND his abilities. If t hey can give him extension in the Special Education class, at least consider it. But if you can pull him out entirely and give him a more customised education, you will have the best result, I feel.
You only get one chance with your child's upbringing and education. The education system stuffed up bigtime, with difficult child 3, wasted so much time and did so much damage. We're still catching up but he's racing ahead in some areas.
If you still believe the myth that autistic kids' social needs can only be met in mainstream (or if people keep nagging about this and you want to shut them up) then check out the website of James Williams. Google "James Williams" and "autism" in the same search window. He's a fascinating kid whose views on this give a fresh perspective.
Good luck. Have faith in yourselves and your son.
Marg