That Crusty Old Camel and His Proverbial Straw

In my prior post I briefly spoke about Emerson's history, and some of the things (those I could remember at the time, anyway.  I forgot a few things that I'll just cover later!) about his early development that did not seem quite right to me.  But we never got to the straw that broke the camel's back.  That moldy straw that brought us to where we are today...kicked out of private school and back in his day center with an evaluation (by a psychologist this time) of autism with possible Sensory Processing Disorder thrown in (awaiting evaluation by a pediatric OT on that one).  So, here goes...

We wanted Emerson in a private school.  We weren't happy about the public school we were zoned for, and we hoped for a smaller school where they could give him a bit more attention.  We found Sts Peter and Paul Catholic School to be pretty close to what we were looking for.  It was a brand new school, only going up to 5th grade with another grade added each year, the new principal seemed fabulous, the building was new and they really invited a lot of parent involvement--which is more than I could say about some of the other schools we visited. 

Classes started on August 18, and Emerson was so excited for Big School.  He even loved his uniform, which I had been a little worried about.  Everything seemed to go smoothly.  We'd get notes in his agenda book...he wasn't sitting still, he hit another child, he told his teacher no, he kept touching the girls' hair, he pushed in line...all things we viewed as "little boy" things or chalked up to being in a new place or still being a little young to be expected to sit still at a desk for any period of time.  And when I talked to a classmates mother and learned her son was getting the same kinds of notes, I wasn't worried about Emerson at all.

He loved doing his homework, although he was very bored at first--while they reviewed colors and shapes--since he had known all that since he was 18 months old!  Even when they began to learn the alphabet, he was fairly bored.  Many of the kids did not know what the letter "K" looked like while Emerson and a couple others would yell out, "K is for king and kite and kangeroo!"  The learning curve, from what it seems, was large and his teacher had her work cut out from her between teaching children who were just starting to learn their letters while keeping those that were a few steps ahead of that interested during classtime.  I began working with Emerson at home in the hopes of keeping him excited about learning.  His teacher gave me a list of sight words they would be learning throughout the year, and he was especially excited about reading.  I took the words he knew, wrote sentences using pictures for the words he didn't know, and he would read them back to me.  By Halloween, we had even written a spooky story about a witch and a ghost!

Everything seemed as if it was going to work out.  And then I received a call from the principal one Monday (Oct. 25).  I had dropped Emerson off, walking him in so I could pay his tuition for the next month instead of dropping him off out front as usual.  He cried when I left, screamed when any of the teachers came near him, and ended up standing in a corner by the gate for quite some time before he was able to calm himself down.  I later learned that they just let him be since he wasn't hurting himself or anyone else--and that was the wisest choice they could have made for him, I know from experience--but he had cried, yelled and made hitting motions at people with his hands for almost 30 minutes.  After he calmed down, he was able to go play with his classmates for the remainder of recess.

The following Monday was worse.  The school asked that the children come dressed as their favorite saint for All Saint's Day.  Emerson went as St. Francis of Assisi.  I walked him in so I could put his costume on.  He fussed a great deal, but let a teacher lead him into the cafeteria.  Late in the morning, I received another call from the principal.  Emerson had had a horrible morning, had been crying all day and throwing tantrums and had to be taken to the office to be calmed down.  When I picked him up, he was trying to discipline the secretary for being bad to him and making him sit in time out!  I took him home and homeschooled him that day.  Every morning after that was a fight to go to school.  He wanted to stay home with Mommy; he didn't like Big School anymore.  I decided that maybe the problem was that he needed to be excited about going to school, so we began doing little art projects, special sentences, colored pictures...anything to get him excited about something his teachers what he had done or learned.  I thought it was working.

Until Monday, November 8th.  That was the camel and straw day.

Mid-morning, I received a call from the school secretary asking me to come pick up my child right away because he was biting the principal.  What???!!!  As soon as I got to school, the principal came out to meet me and said that Emerson had been brought to his classroom because he was acting up in class so much that the teachers couldn't handle him anymore and had brought him into the office where the principal was usually able to calm him down.  He told me, "He started swinging his arms and yelling, then he fell on the ground and started biting my shoes and trying to bite my shins.  He's like an animal. An animal!"  Now wait a second....how can you possibly think it's appropriate to tell a parent that her child is like an animal??  I think he definitely could have chosen his words more wisely.  And the look on his face when he said it?  Don't get me started.  I lost a lot of respect for him that day.

He asked that we keep Emerson home until we could sit down with him and a counselor or psychologist of some kind to try to figure out what was going on.  They had already called in the guidance counselor from the nearby public school, who was unable to help.  Of course I started crying right away.  I couldn't even speak I was so scared for Emerson as I listened to the principal go on about Emerson's current state of mind and the behaviors he was portraying.  I think that was one of the hardest moments of my life.  I couldn't even speak to Emerson when they brought me in to him, and could only tell him it was time to go.

When we got home, I sat on the couch and cried.  Emerson came up to me, ran his hand down my hair and started murmuring, "Awww...it's OK, honey.  It's going to be alright. Don't cry, honey."  And that made me cry harder because, in that moment, with that one act, I knew.  He wasn't empathizing with me, he wasn't trying to make me feel better because he felt sad that I was crying...he was mimicking what we said and did when he cried.  Daycare had told me several times that he didn't seem to know how to empathize, couldn't connect to other children's emotions.  Now, I believed them.

After talking it over, we decided to withdraw Emerson from Sts Peter & Paul completely and seek help from a psychologist.  That same afternoon, I wrote to Emerson's teacher who seemed surprised when I told her Emerson wasn't coming back anytime soon.  I think she and the principal thought that we would be bringing Emerson back within a week or so.  I asked her to fill me in on what had happened that day and when she wrote back, I learned that more had been going on than we were aware.  The following is bits and pieces taken from her e-mail to me:

We have found that since Monday, October 25, he had become more emotional with his crying and tantrums as well as becoming increasingly more defiant to our instructions. He has cried every day since then except for one....

Monday, November 8 was the worst day he has had. Here is what I remember from that day. When it was time to line-up in the morning he did not want to get in the line....Then when walking to get in the classroom door, another child was trying to come in and Emerson pushed him out of the way. When he came in the room he ran up to the board and said he wanted to write his name. I told him he could write his name later, but right  now it was time to unpack. A few minutes after that, I had started teaching and he kept running up to the board insisting he needed to write his name. We asked him several times to please sit down on his square or on the chair next to his table. He continued to take the marker and started writing his name on the board. Mrs. ______ brought him outside to talk to him about it and to try to calm him down. He started swinging his arms and yelling at her to stop it and leave him alone. When she lowered his arms down, he bit her on her arm. She then brought him to the office, Dr. _______ was not in there yet, so she brought him back to the classroom and had him sit in the chair in the back....He sat at his table and put both of his feet up on top of the table. Ms. _______ told him to put his feet on the floor because putting them on top of the table is bad manners.  He then told her to hush her mouth and then he said “You hush your mouth too Ms. _________.” I told him that it is not nice to be mean to his teachers. He then said, "you all need to just hush your mouth!”....He ended up staying in the classroom with us during music so we gave him a little board and a marker for him to write his name. He was fine in the classroom writing his name.  Shortly after it was time to go to recess outside.  The other Pre-K teacher was on duty. She said that Emerson had thrown another child on the ground during recess and that when it was time to go back to the classroom, he refused to walk back with them so she had to  pick him up and carry him back to the hallway. Dr. ______ came in my classroom during recess and asked us how Emerson was doing today. We told him what he had done earlier in the day. Dr. _______ was in the hallway when the other teacher told him what happened at recess. This is when Dr. _______ brought him to his office and called you to come get him.

[Side note:  The first thing I noticed about this was that when he began swinging his arms and shouting, the aide lowered his arms.  Uh-oh.  I knew this was a bad idea when Emerson got worked up, and we had told the principal, but I don't think we told his teacher (Lesson Learned #1:  Make sure you give the same info to all school personnel because what you tell one might not get passed on to the rest!).  If Emerson starts in with a tantrum/meltdown, the last thing you want to do is touch him.  This sets him off on what I know recognize as a Fight or Flight mode.  In his case, it's usually Fight.  He feels trapped/scared when he is restrained in any way, which makes him lash out even more.  This is also what happened, I think, when the principal took him into the office and tried to calm him down.  Touching him in any way after he has been going for so long only results in further acts of aggression on his part.  There is no holding him tight to calm him or placing weighted items on top of him as is the case with other autistic children.  For Emerson, the best course of action is to tell him he has to sit apart until he calms down and can join the class/group/family again.]

His teacher also gave me a overall description of Emerson as she had observed in her classroom:

In general, Emerson will get an idea and will then insist on doing it. If he is told or made to do otherwise then what he wants to do at that time, he usually gets very upset. He may cry, scream, swing his arms, and say rude things to whoever is trying to correct him. When we try to correct him or redirect his behavior he usually tells us to stop it and that we are being mean to him because we are not allowing him to do what he wants to do at the time. He has told me several times that he does not want to go to school and that he wants to stay at home with his mommy. When we ask him to make good choices or to act like a big boy, he usually says “no” or “I don’t want to.” Almost any time that he is around other children, he will push, shove, hit, or pull on them. If he is on the learning mat, he will touch, pinch, squeeze their faces, pull on their ears or lay down in their squares. The methods we use with the other children such as verbal warnings, redirecting the behavior, praising good behavior, the behavior chart, punishments, and rewards are not effective for him the majority of the time. He usually has little interest in playing with the other kids and a lot of time he won’t even respond at all when Jackson tries to get his attention.

(Jackson is his friend from daycare, the third 3 Musketeer, and his parents enrolled him at Sts Peter and Paul too.  It made us very happy that Emerson would have a friend with him.)  In this description, Emerson sounds very headstrong and defiant.  He has big problems with transitions, and I think that comes out in this description a bit too.  It's very difficult for him to move from one activity to the next, especially if he's involved with something he enjoys, without being given enough notice beforehand that everyone will be shifting gears.  The other alarming thing in this description for me is that he has little interest in playing with other children.  When it comes down to it, Emerson likes to act out his own little fantasies all by himself. 

I wrote to Emerson's teacher again and asked if I could meet with both her and the classroom aide, who spent a considerable amount of time with Emerson, and they agreed to meet.  I think they both might have been a bit nervous that I was going to come in with accusations or to cause problems, but I really wanted to go in to thank them because I know how hard they worked with him and how much effort they put in to making the school day work for him.  We were very lucky that Emerson was placed with two such caring women.  They went above and beyond what other teachers would have done, and they put up with his behavior for a lot longer than I would have in their shoes!

I told them of our decision to withdraw him from school that year.  The school did just not have the resources necessary to deal with a child such as Emerson.  There were other issues at play at the school that concerned us, especially with after school care, that they were trying to iron out and it wasn't going to be fair to them or to Emerson to try to keep him there.  He wouldn't be getting the extra help and attention he needed, and the other children would suffer if his teachers had to continue stopping to take care of one issue after another because of him.  It really was the only decision Thomas and I could make.

The meeting I had with Emerson's teacher and her classroom aide was very emotional for the three of us, and we all cried a little.  Even in those few months, they had grown close to Emerson.  It was very sad for me because part of my dream for him died right there.  He's going to be fine...I know he's going to be fine.  But part of your hopes, your dreams, your fantasies about your child's future fade away and disappear.  And you need to mourn them.

I don't know where Emerson will end up going to school this coming autumn.  I don't know how much help he'll need or what kind of help he'll need.  That's a different set of issues that we've yet to deal with.  Right now, we're taking it one day at a time, one appointment at a time.

Emerson is back at his prior day center and he's much happier.  He likes going to "Little School" and doesn't fight us in the mornings any more.  They've been wonderful and have adapted their approach to him, making special allowances and keeping us in the loop with everything...when he has a hard day, different things they're trying and whether or not they've been successful.

There was a period of time towards the end of his stint at Sts Peter and Paul when he was beginning to be very unhappy, very argumentative at home, and even starting to distance himself from us.  Now, he's back to his old self.

As his teacher wrote to me:

Emerson is a very sweet, affectionate, bright and well-mannered child ....
 
I couldn't agree more.