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The hardest part about Wright School is leaving Wright School. For six months your kid has been nourished by school, possibly for the first time. They have been taught and you’ve seen academic progress. You’ve seen mind and attitude changes too. What happens when my kiddo graduates? The hope is that new strategies and structures will be there as well as support from the school informed by the time spent at Wright School.

The goodbye at Wright School is perhaps the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It is deliberate. Each child and teacher offers their reflections of the graduate. They write it down too so that Emerson has a copy. Then Emerson gives his reflections to each classmate and teacher too. Just in case you were wondering, teachers who leave the program also go through this graduation ceremony too. It felt like a warm blanket being wrapped around my family.

We came home with not just the projects and work completed, but posters and things to remind Emerson of the strategies learned. Sending him back to Wake County Schools seemed so frightening in comparison to a school that was all kind words, affirmations, movement, and positivity.

Wright School was right there in the meeting to transition Emerson back to our regular public school. We also had such a wonderful educator in Emerson’s 6th grade teacher Ms. Laurie Bauchman. She was leaving WCPSS, but she made sure that Emerson got the one-on-one aid that we so desperately needed. I saw a partnership in that meeting unlike I’ve ever witnessed.

We’ve done OK since Emerson left. He has struggled in school a bit, but shows us everyday sparks of progress. I don’t worry about his morning routine or his evening routine. He takes a daily shower basically at the same time every night. That is Wright School. I need to remind him about mindfulness, but he knows how to reset his system.

So, there is a part of me that never wanted my kiddo to leave the sanctuary that Wright School created especially for our neuro-diverse students. Yet, that is the purpose. The purpose of the Wright School is to for students to leave and restart their lives with better strategies for the entire family. Now we need to work on our community. Center our schools, our towns, our greater world to put kids and their entire selves first.

I hope everyone who reads this gets to know about a little gem of program here in North Carolina. I hope everyone gets to understand that when we fund these programs we all get to benefit. That indeed a public school can do great things. I also hope we build on that model, expand that model. Finally, our kids aren’t broken, don’t need a cure, but with a little love, mindfulness, resources and support they can get the restart they need to thrive.

What makes the Wright School experience so unique to me is that my child was accepted. Now I’m sure that doesn’t sound like much, but it really ended up being the difference maker. The school even took his sensory issues seriously and accommodated all his issues, even though I questioned them myself sometimes.

The philosophy of the Wright School can be read on their web site. https://www.ncdhhs.gov/divisions/state-operated-healthcare-facilities/wright-school/history-and-philosophy The idea that we aren’t curing anything, but instead creating a home and community support system doesn’t sound that innovative. However, I assure you it is. It is the approach to mental health and disability that gets overlooked.

Friday at noon is pickup at Wright School. Generally music played loudly and not a lot was said. Except on day when we were nearly home, Emerson just asked, “Do you believe in the medical or social model?” Out of context, I had zero idea what in the world he was talking about at the moment. However, he went on push and asked if I believed in the medical model of disability.

So, thanks to the Wright School and their deep discussion of Flowers for Algernon, my child was schooling me on disability justice. I admit if Emerson had read that short story in his old school, I probably would have flipped out. However, my kiddo came away from the group discussion and the story with a new found pride in his own disability and some righteous indignation about how we treat disability in America. I had tears in my eyes after the discussion.

The supports for Emerson’s mental health were all there on site. He was monitored, evaluated, and our liaison teacher counselor met with both my husband and I regularly. He even texted us fun stories about Emerson. He became a part of our family unit for the time. He became a friend to Emerson through music class.

This school is a public school, but operates under the Department of Health and Human Services and not DPI. We didn’t have to even worry about EOGs at the school. It is supported with public money and the state has the knowledge and success numbers to recreate this environment if it chooses.

Wright School does things right, and with some resources and well money, we could find ways to replicate so much of what they do right. I’d love to see liaison teacher counselors in every public school. I’d love to see the philosophy really adapted. If feel like right now as long as a child doesn’t act too disabled then they earn the right to be in general education.

When alternative learning environments are mentioned by folks at the North Carolina General Assembly I give pause. There aren’t spaces like Wright School in most places in North Carolina. We risk segregating kids and putting them in a holding cell. The Wright School is a wonderful example of a restart school doing things well and intently keeping the mental health of students a priority. Not every child needs a partially residential restart school. When they do, it should be like the Wright School.

As I begin January 2023, I think back on our Wright School journey that began in earnest in 2022 with a spot at this amazing school. Its hard, actually, because as we’re back out in a regular public school setting and I need to keep reminding myself and my child of all the positive things we learned to do at Wright School.

I admit in 2022 I was petrified to tell Emerson we were sending him to yet another school. He’d been in a constant state of change since 3rd grade and here we were in the middle 6th grade about to change schools again. 6th grade was going OK in general, but we were watching things decline as the first semester went forward and Emerson’s willingness to learn declined. I was looking forward to the change, but wasn’t sure how Emerson felt.

We waited till after the holidays to begin the discussion. We just sat Emerson down and began to discuss the school. It wasn’t until we got to the part that it was partially residential that Emerson erupted with shouting and went into his room to calm down. As parents, we just waited. After about 30 minutes, Emerson came out somewhat calm and said quite simply, he’d try it.

The visit with Emerson was impressive. We toured the school. We saw the room Emerson would be using and discussed details down to the fan he’d use at night. The best part was that the visit was mainly student led. Emerson got to choose if he wanted to sit in the classroom with the students or if he’d prefer them to come talk to him one on one. He chose one on one. So each student came and talked about their experience at Wright School. They gave advice and things that they loved and struggled with about the school. One kid drew Emerson a picture. I think we all came away with anticipation.

One thing to keep in mind was that Covid was being taken seriously. Not just with pairing vaccinated kids up but also masking. While masking for a school day wasn’t a favorite thing of Emerson, it was limited. Once we were home at 3pm the mask came off. Well Wright School was masked even as the academic day ended. Of course there were breaks and Emerson could sleep and be in his room without a mask, still was a lot to ask of kid who didn’t like masks. Yet I think the beauty of Wright School was that it was expected school wide of both kids and teachers. I think the fact that it was adopted policy for the school including for me if I visited, helped normalize things.

Dropping off Emerson was difficult. I was filled with so much anticipation, fear, anxiety and all the while trying my best to mask all my feelings. We did have liaison throughout this process. The parent support was phenomenal. Encouraging text were so needed and helpful. Emerson called us every night that week. It dawned on me how little Emerson had spoken on the phone to anyone so it took a while to get phone protocols down. Drop off that first week and drop off going forward really went smoothly.

We made it week by week. Every week Emerson complained less and less about school. In fact on the weekends I began to hear how Wright School was better than home in some ways. He loved the fact that every week they went somewhere or did something. He started taking routine showers daily. Emerson began to like his school.

    By now, many news outlets have carried stories about extremist school board candidates.  We have many school board candidates on record from their social media and even at actual school board meetings spouting hateful rhetoric at our teachers, students, and administrators.  We have candidates still denying the harm of the Pandemic and science.  However, there is a bigger issue that many aren’t pointing out, and that is that many of the school board candidates have no idea what goes on inside a public school

     Everyday our teachers are faced with enormous challenges and they meet those challenges to make a positive learning space for our children.  Underpaid school personnel stay late when kids miss the bus or buses are late.  They take complicated subjects and break them down to help students learn.  They meet students where they are and help them achieve more than they thought possible.  Our public schools are doing amazing work everyday. When school board candidates fail to celebrate our public schools as well as talk about the challenges, I know they’re unqualified for the job.                                                                                                                

    Our schools do indeed face challenges.  In North Carolina, our courts ruled that our children are not getting a sound basic education and they’ve placed funding benchmarks that our state needs to provide to get us back on track.  The underfunding of our schools is no longer a debate, it is an adjudicated fact.  Instead of talking about the systemic underfunding of our schools or the inequities in funding,  I hear candidates accuse our local schools of mismanagement and fraud with no evidence.  They pledge to cut administrative staff that have nowhere left to cut.  Too many candidates don’t even have a basic understanding of how schools are funded and how those funds are used.

   Finally, when candidates offer solutions to problems that either don’t exist or don’t exist in a way that they understand.  Take Special Education for instance, I heard a school board candidate Michele Morrow offer suggestions that we should be teaching life skills and job skills as if we don’t already do those things.  The same board candidate even suggested removing special education students from general classrooms because they’re contributing to teaching mediocrity.  None of this is legal or true.  We have enormous issues to overcome when it comes to Special Education, and the last thing we need is someone spouting ableist garbage getting in the way.

   I don’t expect every person who runs for school board to be an expert in education, but they should be striving to understand and know as much as they can with accurate information.  I expect candidates to be involved in our public schools in some capacity even if it’s being their biggest cheerleader.  Belief in public schools as a public good as well as investing in our children should be a baseline in which all candidates on both sides agree.  Sadly the fact that not all candidates see our public schools as a positive is one of the biggest dangers facing public schools today.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

So, our family was doing OK in 2020 despite so many challenges. We were thankful to be healthy and excited about even the possibility of a vaccine. Root Elementary was a godsend. We not only were blessed with a great teacher, but the principal was fantastic as well. He said he was from Vance County, I mentioned working on Leandro, and it was all good from there. Wright School had to completely close for a while and rethink how they were going to operate as a non-residential school.

Going back in person in the late fall of 2020 was a difficult choice. I had to weigh my kiddo’s mental health and physical health risks. I kept trying to find compromises. It was made more difficult by a county flipping how contained classrooms were going to run last minute. We also faced a district that just wasn’t really wanting to be flexible which in many ways is still true. We didn’t actually get back in the classroom to almost Thanksgiving. I also made my own compromise. We would do lunch at home and the rest of the day virtual. Since the teacher was doing hybrid anyway, it was the best solution to a difficult problem. First and foremost most outbreaks at school were happening during times when folks weren’t wearing masks, like at lunch. Second, kiddo wasn’t able to tolerate looking/seeing/smelling other people’s food. IEP to the rescue and we had a plan to get kiddo at least partially back to normal.

In the summer of 2020 into the fall I was working hard to advocate for disability students in person opportunities, while still maintaining a very high level of safety. Around October, Wright School called. There was an opening. It was at this point running as a day school. A long day school with the school day ending around 6PM. I had a tough decision to make. Everyone I knew who loved the Wright School praised what they did in the evening program. The evening program wasn’t operating during Covid. I also wondered how tough going back and forth for a long day of school and essentially an after school program. We had a new plan for the start of in-person school, but we hadn’t yet seen if it was going to work. Going from total virtual into a very long full day seemed like a big change.

Ultimately, our family decided to wait till the school was back to full residential. It was a scary tough decision. I think having such a wonderful team at Root Elementary really helped. In the winter of 2020, I felt like we still needed healing time and growth. He was doing both and I wasn’t sure of anything at the moment. So we waited.

A year later, in November I got a phone call that my child had a spot. They were up and running the residential program now. The tour was amazing. Safety was so key and a school run by DHHS didn’t disappoint. Vaccinated kids shared rooms with vaccinated kids. Masks were serious business there. Lots of air movement and school wide protocols. My kiddo had a slot in January and my husband and I were excited for the opportunity. Now to convince the kid.

Handle Me with Care

Our family’s journey to the Wright School was a long one and one impacted by the Global Pandemic known as Covid. Yet, even before and as Covid hit us, I was scrambling to get services and resources with a kid on Home Hospital. How to fill my child’s day with things he might enjoy when it felt like his interests were so limited? Meanwhile boredom always lead to tears and frustration from everyone. So, I looked for supplemental schools and therapy. On the advice of my kid’s therapist, I even looked seriously at ABA therapy for the first time.

There were several reasons I didn’t look into or consider ABA earlier. My kiddo didn’t get the official Autism stamp of approval until he was ending preschool, and headed to full day Kindergarten. Not that he was too old, but he wasn’t in the sweet spot when so many kids get ABA at home. When he was younger he was just classified as unspecified developmental delay, and Autism specifically wasn’t on any paperwork. I think I asked our developmental therapist about ABA once and she just shrugged, and said it wouldn’t be a good fit for my kid.

Applied Behavior Analysis has been the gold standard for Autism therapy for years, and its also highly controversial. I was in the dark about the controversy until I started to follow and read the experiences of adults who were diagnosed with Autism and received ABA as children. As with most things, I read and learned as much as I can. What I learned was that ABA was developed by Ole Ivar Lovaas. He also created Gay Conversion Therapy. The idea in the beginning was to make someone appear less autistic. Rewards and punishments all with the goal of eye contact, no stimming, and speaking when spoken to. Its all under the umbrella of looking neurotypical.

Now if you talk to many folks they will swear that ABA has changed. I’m not so convinced. Mainly because they’re still using behaviorism. This idea that rewards will change behavior. Think B.F. Skinner and his rats. I’ve used so many reward methods with and without some sort of discipline associated. I took away so many things from my kiddo, that at one point there was just a bed and crash pad in his room. I’ve used reward charts, jars and things where everything was positive. Yet none of this worked. I used in conjunction with what I thought was accommodating his needs. All I got was a kid so anxious that he’d not get a reward and at the end of the day he sabotaged himself.

Still, I was going to give anything a chance at this stage. Maybe I was mistaken and they unlocked some new strategy I’d never tried. So, my kiddo went in for a very pricey evaluation. My family were most interested at the time to getting kiddo back to being able to tolerate everyone eating together at a dinner table. He seemed to be really rigid around even seeing other people eat food he didn’t like. There were also a myriad of other issues I had in my head.

When I got the evaluation back it was like seeing a plan from the underpants gnomes from South Park.

Autistic / Sensory Issue —> ?—> Goal Met

When I asked how they were going to meet their goals with an emphasis that rewards and withholding things wouldn’t work, no one had an answer. They didn’t even talk about relationships. It was just that they’d be able to make rewards and ‘other things’ work this time. When kiddo said he didn’t like it there at their office I took it as the last sign. Nope.

So what did I do instead? At the same time our therapist gave us ABA recommendations, she also gave me an article on Polyvagal Theory. I began to read everything I could on the Polyvagal Theory. I read Beyond Behaviors by Mona Delahooke PhD. It’s still a work in progress but I began throwing all the discipline/punishment way of parenting that I had been taught my entire life. I went on a journey of creating a home life that calm and truly accommodating. I really stopped pushing that we needed to be normal and embraced kiddo for himself. I began to completely reframe Autism as our new normal.

So in the midst of a global Pandemic, some things in our house got significantly better. By changing my mindset, I began to see where I was pushing for things that weren’t necessary. If my kiddo ate a meal on his own and it made him happier and he felt he could trust me, then great. I needed to realize that no amount of rewards were going to change his sensory profile. My kid needed to feel safe and secure. Home was the first place to start.

In the archives , you can read my other struggles during that time. So, many things were going on at once and I was trying to reframe my state of mind as a parent. The best thing is that it worked. We’re not perfect, but the change has been dramatic. So, if you’ve rejected ABA and wondering if there is anything else out there, there is, and it works.

What does this have to do with Wright School? Well it put my family on a track that while we waited we survived as a functioning family. It put our minds and some of the philosophy of the Wright School in sync. It got us through a significant waiting period when there was nothing I could do when the world shut down. It was simply part of my family’s journey.

Links to Polyvagal Theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec3AUMDjtKQ&ab_channel=PsychAlive

Mona Delahooke PhD (She also has a new wonderful book out) https://monadelahooke.com/beyond-behaviors/

You’re going to hear a lot about Autism this month. Some call it Autism Awareness Month, others may say Autism Acceptance, while here in my house its more Autism Appreciation Month. Regardless, you’re going to see articles that get it right, but unfortunately too many who get it wrong. I’m just going to share a few of my favorite resources.

Like anything, check the source. The best source on Autism is Autistics. If you’re looking for resources check out Autism Self Advocacy Network. There are great resources on YouTube as well. I really like a series done a few years ago called Ask an Autistic. I also like Hunter Hansen -The Life Autistic and Robin Roscigno Tedx Talk.

You should probably be aware that symbols we normalized in the past to represent Autism were manufactured by neurotypicals. Autistics in your life may not like to be symbolized by a puzzle piece. In fact, many in the Autism community prefer the infinity symbol and/or using rainbow colors for inclusion. You might want to ask before posting a bunch of puzzle pieces if your loved one likes that symbol.

One of the best books out there on the history of Autism as a diagnosis is NeuroTribes-The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. by Steve Silberman. It gives an incredible perspective on Autism throughout history and how our current definition hasn’t really been in practice that long at all. I also like the recent book, We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by UNC Grad Eric M. Garcia.

What I love about Garcia’s perspective is not only is he actually autistic, but that he gives real life policy examples. Public policy that could benefit those with disabilities. He also speaks from a non-white perspective which is so important as disability and policy surrounding disability is impacted by white supremacy.

I also enjoyed reading Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum. by Jennifer O’Toole. A great read especially if you’re from a generation that didn’t have definitions of Autism that included traits found in girls and women. It’s something I’ve begun to explore in my own life. Maybe some of us just aren’t just introverted, but it goes deeper. Don’t be afraid to explore. Self diagnosis or even formal diagnosis can be healing and eye opening. I’m in the process myself.

My very favorite video is this from Robin Roscigno. It reminds how I started and how I’m trying to learn and be a better parent and citizen on this earth.