The Elephant in the Playroom by Denise Brodey

Author:Denise Brodey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

“I Got That Autistic Kid”

Patti Gaultney

Patti Gaultney is the mother of Wesley, a seventeen-year-old boy diagnosed with autism at age four. She and her family live in Santa Barbara, California.

Imagine this: On your son’s first day of second grade, his new teacher walks into the teachers’ lounge, sits down, and says to a fellow staffer, “Damn, they stuck me with that autistic kid.” This is the way my son’s teacher—the woman with whom he would be spending five days a week for the next year—reacted to having my little boy in her class. Another teacher and friend overheard the exchange and reported it back to me.

It was as if Wesley had a red-inked label of autism boldly stamped across his forehead. He wasn’t seen as a real, live person—a person with potential.

The teacher refused to bend in any way to help Wesley learn. At my husband’s and my first meeting with her, I asked if we could implement “priming” with Wesley. (Priming is a strategy in which a child is introduced to the class work in a relaxed home atmosphere before it’s presented in school, so the child can be acclimated to the material and therefore less anxious and better able to focus when the material is presented in school.) She said priming was impossible— that even she didn’t know in advance what she would be teaching. She offered no compromises, no discussion, only a flat no.

We soon realized that it wasn’t that Wesley’s teacher didn’t know what she was going to teach in advance. As worksheets came home, we noticed that the copyright dates were twenty years old. She knew what she was going to teach—the exact same thing she had been teaching for twenty years. She simply did not want to be bothered with a special-needs child. Unfortunately, Wesley made little academic progress that year.

We were optimistic, however, as Wesley began third grade. His elderly teacher seemed sweet, but we soon discovered that she, too, had preconceived notions about the worth of special-needs students versus her “real” students. Outside the classroom, there were even more challenges. Wesley didn’t know how to make friends or how to judge the quality of friendships. In his desperation to connect, he mistook the attention of a group of bullies for friends. One day, he arrived home from school with a plate-size dark bruise on his back. I immediately took him back to school and showed it to the school nurse and principal. The principal merely shrugged his shoulders and announced, “Boys will be boys.” The bullying persisted. As third grade progressed, Wesley was talked out of his lunch, money, jacket, and backpack.

One evening when Wesley was eight, Wesley’s third-grade teacher called. She asked, in her sweet, singsongy voice, if we had heard about the incident at school. “What incident?” I asked, as the hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle. After speaking with her for a while, it became clear that while the children were waiting for the bus, Wesley started to question the ringleader, repeating his question over and over.

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