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The following is the text of the email I just sent to the Principal of Southwest Middle School:
Dr Carcara,
Sara forwarded to me the email you sent her yesterday requesting a meeting and asking for more information. I don’t know if she has replied to you yet, but I suspect not. The bulk of our focus yesterday was in working out the final details of starting Ben at Princeton House and preparing for his first day this morning. Ben has had sleep issues pretty much since birth, and starting this morning he has to get up an hour earlier each day for Sara to be able to get him ready for school and then drive him up to Princeton House to drop him off before coming back down to work where she teaches at Chain of Lakes. They should be walking out the door right now as I write this. Being his first day at a new school, we will be on pins and needles all day waiting to hear any news on how he is doing.
One point of clarity: Sara is my ex-wife. We have been divorced for almost a decade now. But whatever our differences, we have always seen eye to eye on anything related to Ben.
Regarding our experience at Southwest, here is what I can tell you:
At the end of last year we were very apprehensive about Ben moving on to middle school. We just didn’t think he was ready. We were assured, however, that Southwest had an excellent program. We were invited on a tour of the school, and in particular were shown the life skills room where Ben would be learning practical real-world skills with a kitchen, a bed to make, a small store to stock and maintain, an office to practice in, etc. We were very impressed with that room, and it went a long way to relieving our concerns.
That room was gone before the first day of school, converted to classroom space for other students.
We were also told that once a week the students went out into the community on field trips to learn life skills. By the time the school year started that became every other week. And eventually it became “most of the class goes, but Ben can only go if Dad comes along to chaperon.”
Historically we have had excellent communication with Ben’s teachers, both back in Seattle and here in Orlando. We had a notebook that went back and forth every day so that we could compare notes and answer questions. Many days the notes from the teachers were as simple as “Ben had a good day” or “Ben had a rough day”, but often the notes were much more detailed and contained questions about specific aspects of Ben’s behavior. In addition, we saw a steady flow of Ben’s school work coming home in the folder, at least several times per week. Bear in mind, this is an essentially non-verbal child. I have never once been able to ask him “how was school today?” and get anything resembling an answer from him. Which doesn’t stop me asking, by the way. In addition to the notebook, we frequently emailed the teachers and always got very prompt replies.
This year, the flow of communication came to a dead stop. The teachers at southwest were not interested in using a notebook. Emails sent to Ms Keene take *days* to get a response. Phone calls to the classroom are impossible, because the phone in the room has not worked, I believe, since the beginning of the school year. Let me repeat that: the telephone in the classroom that is supposed to meet the needs for all of the middle-school-aged autistic children in the entire western learning community has not functioned for several months, and absolutely nothing has been done about it. I cannot think of any reasonable excuse for that, and you should be ashamed to have that happening in your school. As far as school work is concerned, the only things I have ever seen come home are holiday art projects. I have no idea what my son has been working on in class for the past six months. Not. A. Clue.
The transition to middle school was a rough one. We wrote off the first several months as just being a hard transition, going to a new school with new teachers and different expectations. Things have been marginally better in the past two months or so, but still Ben came home upset and crying on the bus at least once a week with no way to explain what was wrong. And that brings me to last Wednesday.
From our perspective, what happened is that Ben came home last Wednesday very upset. Upset to the point that it carried on throughout the evening and right on up through bedtime. He came home wearing someone else’s coat. He came home without any of his video tapes or CD’s. As a side note, in case you don’t understand it, Ben uses those tapes as his transitional objects. Just having them with him makes him feel safe and happy. Not having them makes him frantic. When I asked the bus driver what happened, I was told that Ben had had a very hard time getting on the bus, that it required getting an administrator involved, and that he was hitting, kicking, and screaming the entire time.
Ben does not just randomly get upset and violent. When he gets frustrated like that, there is always a very specific reason. In this case, he was upset because he was being taken to the bus when he realized he had left his tapes in the classroom. Had anyone stopped and actually listened to him, he would have been very clear about what the problem was. The entire situation could have been defused by simply allowing him to return to the classroom and gather his treasured belongings. That kind of thing is specifically the reason that the ESE students are released to go to the bus earlier than the other students. Instead, Ben was put into someone else’s clothing, dragged out to the bus, ignored, terrorized, and dragged away from his things.
The best way I can describe it to someone not familiar with him is to say, imagine that you were on vacation in a foreign country where you spoke only a few words of the language. And imagine also that you, like my mother, suffer from a rare blood disorder that requires you to take blood thinners every single day. Missing a single dosage means almost certain death from a stroke or a pulmonary embolism. Now imagine that you are grabbed by the local police, you don’t understand why, you don’t understand what they are saying, and they won’t listen to you as they drag you away. You know that if you don’t get your medicine you will die, but nobody will listen to you.
That is exactly how Ben felt on Wednesday afternoon.
You and I both know that Ben would not die from not having a few video tapes overnight. But to him they are that important.
Now, by Thursday morning all we had to go on was the bus driver’s account of the incident. A phone call to the classroom was unsuccessful because of the afore-mentioned broken telephone. An email to Ms Keene requesting more information went unanswered until late Friday evening. A phone call to the sixth grade administrator first thing in the morning went unanswered for several hours. I finally drove down to the school and walked into the office asking to speak to the sixth grade administrator, and was informed that she was in a meeting with you. My name and number were taken down, and she finally called me back an hour later.
My conversation with her was short. She did not know anything about the incident, and while she said I was correct to contact her she thought that Dr. Letzo would be the better person for me to talk to. Within fifteen minutes I had a return call from him, and we spoke at length. To his credit, Dr. Letzo seemed genuinely concerned from the minute I began speaking to him.
I wound up back at the school, and the two of us walked down to the classroom to speak to Ms Keene. She told us that she had not been present on Wednesday afternoon; apparently she had some sort of mandatory training meeting that afternoon. So it was one of the Paras that put Ben on the bus that day, I believe it was Miss Ruby. Ms Keene said she was not even aware there had been an incident until Thursday evening when she finally checked here email and saw Sara’s request for more information. Please note that Ms Keene had not yet at that point *replied* to that email. Just a quick note saying “I wasn’t there, but let me find out what happened and get back to you” would have been sufficient at that point, but we got nothing. Miss Ruby did not know what had happened on the bus, and was not aware that Ben did not have his tapes. This person who has been working with our son for six months, and who should know his major ticks by now, was blissfully unaware and simply marched him to the bus ignoring his pleas. She did not know who the “administrator” was that the bus driver said had become involved. Two days on, and nobody in the classroom had any idea what had happened.
I left that day more than a little frustrated, and Dr. Letzo called and left a message later that afternoon saying that he would like to meet with me again on Monday. Sara elected to take a sick day to come in as well, and at ten o’clock Monday morning we both came down to the school. I saw Sara’s car there when I arrived, but did not see her until she actually walked into Dr. Letzo’s office. She later told me that she had gone to Ben’s classroom to speak to Ms Keene before the meeting.
She said when she walked into the classroom, the room reeked of urine. One of the Paras was out of the room on an errand. The other Para was in the bathroom helping a student. Ms Keene was sitting at a computer with her back to the room, which was in absolute chaos. Ms Keene did not even hear Sara enter. A child could have walked out that door and she would not have noticed. Sara spoke with Ms Keene, and it turns out that it was the teacher next door who had been involved on the bus that day. She claims that Ben was not only hitting and kicking, but that he bit her hand.
Now I wasn’t there. I am not going to call her a liar. But I would like to note that Ben has never, *ever* bitten anyone. Not to our knowledge. And that is definitely a behavior that we would have taken note of. So if you are keeping notes, we had an incident on Wednesday that allegedly and apparently reached a height of violence that Ben has never exhibited before, and nobody took a step back to reassess the situation. Nobody listened to Ben to try to resolve his anxiety. Nobody thought to phone the parents. And it took two days for us to find out any kind of detailed information about what happened. That, simply put, is not right.
This teacher (I’m sorry, I forget her name) came up with Sara to the meeting with Dr. Letzo. We all talked for about a half hour, and came to the conclusion that we needed another meeting with more people involved in order to air out our concerns. We left, but shortly after leaving campus Sara decided that since she had taken the day off she would go back and take Ben out of school for the day.
Now what I am about to describe, obviously I was not there. This is based on what Sara told me. But I have no reason to doubt her.
She returned to the campus and was about to walk into the office to check Ben out when she heard his voice across the courtyard. Apparently Ben’s class was out at PE. She followed the sound, and saw Ben sitting off to the side while the Paras were bouncing balls with the other children. She sat down next to Ben and talked to him for several minutes. Then she got up to take him back to the classroom to gather his things, and that’s when she realized that none of the adults had even noticed her yet. She walked away with Ben, and still none of the adults took note. She took him back to the classroom, spoke to Ms Keene, and gathered up all of Ben’s things. She was just about to walk out the door when one of the Paras came running in the room in a panic looking for Ben. It had taken them that long to notice that he was missing.
And that was the final straw.
Monday afternoon we drove up to Princeton House to see the campus and to meet the teachers. Through a very lucky coincidence there just happened to be an open slot in the classroom best suited for Ben, and we were able to have Ben enrolled there and start today. Everybody at the school is a trained expert in working with autistic children. The campus is secure. The telephones work. The teachers respond promptly to questions, and not only is there good communication between parents and teachers but parents are actually *required* to attend monthly meetings and to volunteer at least 20 hours for every school year. Oh, and they have a life skills room that the students spend an hour in each day, which hasn’t been taken over by other classrooms.
There is no question in my mind that Ben is much better off in his new school. It has taken me over an hour to write this, and I just heard from Sara that the drop off went very well, and that Ben seemed very happy to be there. The transition to this new school has already gone far better than the transition to Southwest was on the first day.
Now I want to be very clear: I do not believe that anyone at Southwest Middle School has anything even close to evil intent. I do believe, however, that Ben has suffered from neglect this year at your school. Benign neglect, to be sure, but neglect all the same. I think you have two Paras who are very nice, well-intentioned people but who lack the training and skills to properly attend to autistic children in Ben’s range of the spectrum. They may be perfectly fine with the higher functioning students that make up the bulk of the class, but six months in they still don’t understand Ben well enough to actually listen to him and understand his needs. And I think that Ms Keene is a very nice person with tons of training and experience, who is genuinely concerned, but who also does not really put forth the energy required for the job. I feel badly for her, she was on the verge of tears yesterday when I came to pick up Ben. I know that she truly regrets what happened last week, and I know that it was not her fault at all. But I can’t help blaming her a little bit for not stepping up and addressing the concerns rapidly. Sara had 160 students last year, including several ESE students that required constant communication with the parents. It’s what the job requires, and she met the needs of the job because it’s what she accepted when she signed the contract and because it’s what the students needed. I know very well that being a teacher is a difficult and largely thankless job. I know that middle school can be a very tough environment as the students hit puberty and all manner of new problems emerge. But at the end of the day, I expect the school to take proper care of my child. We do not leave Ben with just anyone. Outside of school, he is always with family. Babysitters are not an option, because no babysitter can understand him well enough in a short period of time to safely care for him. We place a huge trust in the school system, and this past week in particular the school system simply let us down too much to forgive.
If you wish to speak to my directly, I can be reached on my cell phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx. I am really not interested in raising a stink at your school. I surely don’t want to go on the warpath and try to get people fired. I would just like to hope that you will take note of our experience and re-evaluate your current program to take whatever actions are necessary to improve it. And please, get that phone fixed. Seriously. There’s just no excuse for that.
- Ron Miles
Dr Carcara,
Sara forwarded to me the email you sent her yesterday requesting a meeting and asking for more information. I don’t know if she has replied to you yet, but I suspect not. The bulk of our focus yesterday was in working out the final details of starting Ben at Princeton House and preparing for his first day this morning. Ben has had sleep issues pretty much since birth, and starting this morning he has to get up an hour earlier each day for Sara to be able to get him ready for school and then drive him up to Princeton House to drop him off before coming back down to work where she teaches at Chain of Lakes. They should be walking out the door right now as I write this. Being his first day at a new school, we will be on pins and needles all day waiting to hear any news on how he is doing.
One point of clarity: Sara is my ex-wife. We have been divorced for almost a decade now. But whatever our differences, we have always seen eye to eye on anything related to Ben.
Regarding our experience at Southwest, here is what I can tell you:
At the end of last year we were very apprehensive about Ben moving on to middle school. We just didn’t think he was ready. We were assured, however, that Southwest had an excellent program. We were invited on a tour of the school, and in particular were shown the life skills room where Ben would be learning practical real-world skills with a kitchen, a bed to make, a small store to stock and maintain, an office to practice in, etc. We were very impressed with that room, and it went a long way to relieving our concerns.
That room was gone before the first day of school, converted to classroom space for other students.
We were also told that once a week the students went out into the community on field trips to learn life skills. By the time the school year started that became every other week. And eventually it became “most of the class goes, but Ben can only go if Dad comes along to chaperon.”
Historically we have had excellent communication with Ben’s teachers, both back in Seattle and here in Orlando. We had a notebook that went back and forth every day so that we could compare notes and answer questions. Many days the notes from the teachers were as simple as “Ben had a good day” or “Ben had a rough day”, but often the notes were much more detailed and contained questions about specific aspects of Ben’s behavior. In addition, we saw a steady flow of Ben’s school work coming home in the folder, at least several times per week. Bear in mind, this is an essentially non-verbal child. I have never once been able to ask him “how was school today?” and get anything resembling an answer from him. Which doesn’t stop me asking, by the way. In addition to the notebook, we frequently emailed the teachers and always got very prompt replies.
This year, the flow of communication came to a dead stop. The teachers at southwest were not interested in using a notebook. Emails sent to Ms Keene take *days* to get a response. Phone calls to the classroom are impossible, because the phone in the room has not worked, I believe, since the beginning of the school year. Let me repeat that: the telephone in the classroom that is supposed to meet the needs for all of the middle-school-aged autistic children in the entire western learning community has not functioned for several months, and absolutely nothing has been done about it. I cannot think of any reasonable excuse for that, and you should be ashamed to have that happening in your school. As far as school work is concerned, the only things I have ever seen come home are holiday art projects. I have no idea what my son has been working on in class for the past six months. Not. A. Clue.
The transition to middle school was a rough one. We wrote off the first several months as just being a hard transition, going to a new school with new teachers and different expectations. Things have been marginally better in the past two months or so, but still Ben came home upset and crying on the bus at least once a week with no way to explain what was wrong. And that brings me to last Wednesday.
From our perspective, what happened is that Ben came home last Wednesday very upset. Upset to the point that it carried on throughout the evening and right on up through bedtime. He came home wearing someone else’s coat. He came home without any of his video tapes or CD’s. As a side note, in case you don’t understand it, Ben uses those tapes as his transitional objects. Just having them with him makes him feel safe and happy. Not having them makes him frantic. When I asked the bus driver what happened, I was told that Ben had had a very hard time getting on the bus, that it required getting an administrator involved, and that he was hitting, kicking, and screaming the entire time.
Ben does not just randomly get upset and violent. When he gets frustrated like that, there is always a very specific reason. In this case, he was upset because he was being taken to the bus when he realized he had left his tapes in the classroom. Had anyone stopped and actually listened to him, he would have been very clear about what the problem was. The entire situation could have been defused by simply allowing him to return to the classroom and gather his treasured belongings. That kind of thing is specifically the reason that the ESE students are released to go to the bus earlier than the other students. Instead, Ben was put into someone else’s clothing, dragged out to the bus, ignored, terrorized, and dragged away from his things.
The best way I can describe it to someone not familiar with him is to say, imagine that you were on vacation in a foreign country where you spoke only a few words of the language. And imagine also that you, like my mother, suffer from a rare blood disorder that requires you to take blood thinners every single day. Missing a single dosage means almost certain death from a stroke or a pulmonary embolism. Now imagine that you are grabbed by the local police, you don’t understand why, you don’t understand what they are saying, and they won’t listen to you as they drag you away. You know that if you don’t get your medicine you will die, but nobody will listen to you.
That is exactly how Ben felt on Wednesday afternoon.
You and I both know that Ben would not die from not having a few video tapes overnight. But to him they are that important.
Now, by Thursday morning all we had to go on was the bus driver’s account of the incident. A phone call to the classroom was unsuccessful because of the afore-mentioned broken telephone. An email to Ms Keene requesting more information went unanswered until late Friday evening. A phone call to the sixth grade administrator first thing in the morning went unanswered for several hours. I finally drove down to the school and walked into the office asking to speak to the sixth grade administrator, and was informed that she was in a meeting with you. My name and number were taken down, and she finally called me back an hour later.
My conversation with her was short. She did not know anything about the incident, and while she said I was correct to contact her she thought that Dr. Letzo would be the better person for me to talk to. Within fifteen minutes I had a return call from him, and we spoke at length. To his credit, Dr. Letzo seemed genuinely concerned from the minute I began speaking to him.
I wound up back at the school, and the two of us walked down to the classroom to speak to Ms Keene. She told us that she had not been present on Wednesday afternoon; apparently she had some sort of mandatory training meeting that afternoon. So it was one of the Paras that put Ben on the bus that day, I believe it was Miss Ruby. Ms Keene said she was not even aware there had been an incident until Thursday evening when she finally checked here email and saw Sara’s request for more information. Please note that Ms Keene had not yet at that point *replied* to that email. Just a quick note saying “I wasn’t there, but let me find out what happened and get back to you” would have been sufficient at that point, but we got nothing. Miss Ruby did not know what had happened on the bus, and was not aware that Ben did not have his tapes. This person who has been working with our son for six months, and who should know his major ticks by now, was blissfully unaware and simply marched him to the bus ignoring his pleas. She did not know who the “administrator” was that the bus driver said had become involved. Two days on, and nobody in the classroom had any idea what had happened.
I left that day more than a little frustrated, and Dr. Letzo called and left a message later that afternoon saying that he would like to meet with me again on Monday. Sara elected to take a sick day to come in as well, and at ten o’clock Monday morning we both came down to the school. I saw Sara’s car there when I arrived, but did not see her until she actually walked into Dr. Letzo’s office. She later told me that she had gone to Ben’s classroom to speak to Ms Keene before the meeting.
She said when she walked into the classroom, the room reeked of urine. One of the Paras was out of the room on an errand. The other Para was in the bathroom helping a student. Ms Keene was sitting at a computer with her back to the room, which was in absolute chaos. Ms Keene did not even hear Sara enter. A child could have walked out that door and she would not have noticed. Sara spoke with Ms Keene, and it turns out that it was the teacher next door who had been involved on the bus that day. She claims that Ben was not only hitting and kicking, but that he bit her hand.
Now I wasn’t there. I am not going to call her a liar. But I would like to note that Ben has never, *ever* bitten anyone. Not to our knowledge. And that is definitely a behavior that we would have taken note of. So if you are keeping notes, we had an incident on Wednesday that allegedly and apparently reached a height of violence that Ben has never exhibited before, and nobody took a step back to reassess the situation. Nobody listened to Ben to try to resolve his anxiety. Nobody thought to phone the parents. And it took two days for us to find out any kind of detailed information about what happened. That, simply put, is not right.
This teacher (I’m sorry, I forget her name) came up with Sara to the meeting with Dr. Letzo. We all talked for about a half hour, and came to the conclusion that we needed another meeting with more people involved in order to air out our concerns. We left, but shortly after leaving campus Sara decided that since she had taken the day off she would go back and take Ben out of school for the day.
Now what I am about to describe, obviously I was not there. This is based on what Sara told me. But I have no reason to doubt her.
She returned to the campus and was about to walk into the office to check Ben out when she heard his voice across the courtyard. Apparently Ben’s class was out at PE. She followed the sound, and saw Ben sitting off to the side while the Paras were bouncing balls with the other children. She sat down next to Ben and talked to him for several minutes. Then she got up to take him back to the classroom to gather his things, and that’s when she realized that none of the adults had even noticed her yet. She walked away with Ben, and still none of the adults took note. She took him back to the classroom, spoke to Ms Keene, and gathered up all of Ben’s things. She was just about to walk out the door when one of the Paras came running in the room in a panic looking for Ben. It had taken them that long to notice that he was missing.
And that was the final straw.
Monday afternoon we drove up to Princeton House to see the campus and to meet the teachers. Through a very lucky coincidence there just happened to be an open slot in the classroom best suited for Ben, and we were able to have Ben enrolled there and start today. Everybody at the school is a trained expert in working with autistic children. The campus is secure. The telephones work. The teachers respond promptly to questions, and not only is there good communication between parents and teachers but parents are actually *required* to attend monthly meetings and to volunteer at least 20 hours for every school year. Oh, and they have a life skills room that the students spend an hour in each day, which hasn’t been taken over by other classrooms.
There is no question in my mind that Ben is much better off in his new school. It has taken me over an hour to write this, and I just heard from Sara that the drop off went very well, and that Ben seemed very happy to be there. The transition to this new school has already gone far better than the transition to Southwest was on the first day.
Now I want to be very clear: I do not believe that anyone at Southwest Middle School has anything even close to evil intent. I do believe, however, that Ben has suffered from neglect this year at your school. Benign neglect, to be sure, but neglect all the same. I think you have two Paras who are very nice, well-intentioned people but who lack the training and skills to properly attend to autistic children in Ben’s range of the spectrum. They may be perfectly fine with the higher functioning students that make up the bulk of the class, but six months in they still don’t understand Ben well enough to actually listen to him and understand his needs. And I think that Ms Keene is a very nice person with tons of training and experience, who is genuinely concerned, but who also does not really put forth the energy required for the job. I feel badly for her, she was on the verge of tears yesterday when I came to pick up Ben. I know that she truly regrets what happened last week, and I know that it was not her fault at all. But I can’t help blaming her a little bit for not stepping up and addressing the concerns rapidly. Sara had 160 students last year, including several ESE students that required constant communication with the parents. It’s what the job requires, and she met the needs of the job because it’s what she accepted when she signed the contract and because it’s what the students needed. I know very well that being a teacher is a difficult and largely thankless job. I know that middle school can be a very tough environment as the students hit puberty and all manner of new problems emerge. But at the end of the day, I expect the school to take proper care of my child. We do not leave Ben with just anyone. Outside of school, he is always with family. Babysitters are not an option, because no babysitter can understand him well enough in a short period of time to safely care for him. We place a huge trust in the school system, and this past week in particular the school system simply let us down too much to forgive.
If you wish to speak to my directly, I can be reached on my cell phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx. I am really not interested in raising a stink at your school. I surely don’t want to go on the warpath and try to get people fired. I would just like to hope that you will take note of our experience and re-evaluate your current program to take whatever actions are necessary to improve it. And please, get that phone fixed. Seriously. There’s just no excuse for that.
- Ron Miles
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