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A good friend of mine is a teacher in the state of Oregon. He teaches 4th grade and is a person of great quality, integrity, and leadership. All of these qualities, however, do not prepare you for dealing with children with spectrum disorders.

Because of underfunding, my friend’s school district moves spectrum children into typical classrooms without support. He has 26 kids in his class; 25 being typical and 1 being on the spectrum.

My friend and I were discussing his classroom recently. He was telling me what he must do to manage the spectrum child in his classroom and how he must spend a 1/4 of his time disciplining the one while the other 25 await instruction.

As I listened to this story, it was easy for me to point out his mistakes, due to the experience I have with spectrum kiddo's, but me pointing out his mistakes does not speak to the bigger issue. How can we as parents throw our children, without support, into a typical environment and expect positive outcomes? If we know that our children learn differently, have sensory issues that make the processing of input more difficult, and have difficulty in large, unpredictable settings, how can we justify sending our children off to school and expect positive outcomes?

Our schools are filled with quality people who care about kids but we as parents must also work daily seeking out environments that foster success for our kids. We cannot expect schools to know what is best but we can expect schools to provide some services as support for a greater strategy. They just need us to be involved so they may learn how to best engage our children.