Finding Our Place-- Successes and Setbacks in the School System. Chapter 4-- Impact of Bullying.

I'm Maria and, my son's name is Andre. He was diagnosed on the spectrum when he was about 17 or 18, so a little bit late. He initially was diagnosed with ADHD when he was five. And he struggled in school with the typical ADHD things like restlessness, difficulty focusing, and things like that. We got him on some medication, and things actually went really well until seventh grade, and then everything fell apart.

He was actually a straight-A student up until that point. In seventh grade, he moved to the middle school. And he started having issues. He wasn't doing homework, wasn't paying attention in class. He was being disruptive. We struggled with the teachers because a lot of them told him he was just being lazy and didn't offer him help.

I actually didn't even know there was a problem until I got one of his midterm report cards, and he was failing every single class. He hadn't turned in any homework. So we sat down, caught up on all the homework. But then he had the same exact thing happen the next semester. He didn't do a thing. And we ended up sitting on the couch doing homework for a whole weekend, trying to catch up.

We started talking to the teachers, and they all just basically told me that he was a bad kid. He didn't care about school. He didn't pay attention in class. He was lazy. He didn't really care about the feedback that he was getting in class.

At that point, we were trying to reset for eighth grade. He started seeing a therapist, but eighth grade was just a repeat of seventh. Once he moved to ninth grade in high school, it got 10 times worse than it was in middle school. He was an excellent test taker. He's one of those kids who, if he hears it, he remembers it. So his philosophy was, why should I do the homework when I already understand it? So he would end up getting 100% on tests but 0% on the homework. And his grades would end up in the 50s.

This continued through his freshman and sophomore years. And junior year was more of the same, until things really exploded. He was failing. He wasn't going to graduate on time. And then some pretty vicious rumors started about him at school. He had gotten upset in study hall because, as a coping mechanism, he likes to listen to music. And he had it pretty loud on his headphones.

A girl behind him asked him to turn the music down, and he lost his temper and basically threw a book at her. After that, she started a really nasty rumor that he just couldn't live down. At that point, they took him out of school and put him in a special self-paced learning program. It wasn't exactly Special Ed, but it was for kids who were in the juvenile court system, kids who were pregnant, and in a similar situation to those.

They basically told me that our only goal is to try to get him to graduate. He did really well at first. He got Bs his first go-around. But then senior year came, and he started tanking again. At the end of his junior year in that program, he had a teacher that really took him under his wing and helped him. But for his senior year, that teacher ended up getting transferred back to the regular school, and Andre just went downhill after that.

He ended up graduating with a super low GPA. He's an exceptionally smart kid, but he barely passed high school. And it kind of felt like they basically shoved him through the system just to get him out.

Bullying changes things. Looking back, I think the reason that things change so drastically in seventh grade is because that's when he started getting bullied pretty severely. Andre joined a basketball team in sixth grade, and some of these kids were really, really good basketball players. But he just wasn't super coordinated. So they were teasing him all the time with, you're not good enough to play with us. I don't know why you're trying to do sports. You're not cut out for it. It basically destroyed his self-esteem.

He stuck with it in eighth grade because he liked to play basketball, but it just got worse. You're never going to have a girlfriend. You're so ugly. So I think the bullying is what changed things a lot.

He didn't care about anything. And he actually started playing video games a lot. When he was 18, he would play video games for like two days straight without sleeping or eating. We actually ended up enrolling him in a treatment center to deal with video game addiction. He was there for about four months. He had a therapist there that he really connected with. And he really, really seemed to be back on track.

One of the great incentives of the program is that they give you a Labrador puppy that you have to take care of to teach you responsibility. If you graduate from the program, you get to keep the puppy. He was set to graduate, and then suddenly he started going downhill and having these violent outbursts. He actually tried to punch one of the teachers, so they put him in isolation until I could fly down and pick him up. Then they kicked him out because of the violence.

They did give him an alternative option, which was sending him to a wilderness therapy program. And if he completed three months successfully there, they would let him keep the dog because he really wanted to keep his puppy. It was actually the therapist there at the wilderness program that suggested he go through the testing to see if he was on the spectrum.

So he was actually diagnosed there. But he ended up doing some of the same things that he did at the other treatment center, and got kicked out. After talking to his therapist, his opinion was that Andre was doing the violent stuff on purpose because he knew he'd get kicked out, and he was kind of scared to face the real world and feel like a failure. So he would rather purposefully fail on his own terms.

Our last attempts-- after that, we brought him home and he actually seemed to be doing OK. Then it was around Christmas time, and he went out Christmas shopping with his dad and ran into a kid from school that was on the basketball team. And the kid started going off on him right off the bat. It was just like that, and everything we had spent the last six months working on was completely gone. He went back to video games, back to violence, back to everything. He even stole $10,000 from us to pay for different things on these games.

We found one more place to send him where they actually work with kids that are specifically ASD. They're supposed to teach them life skills and things like that. He was successful there for about two to three months. And then three months into it, another therapist that he really connected with left. Once again, everything went to pot, and he got kicked out of there for punching a window out.

When he was down there, he actually got so violent that he was placed in a psych ward for a week because he was threatening to kill one of the people in the house. At that point, we brought him back home. And he's been living with us now for about a year and a half, spending most of his time in the basement on his computer.

I would say as he's gotten older, he is learning to control his temper more, which is a huge success for our family because when it was bad, it was bad. He would try to beat up his dad. He had knocked me off my feet a few times and had gotten violent with his brother and sister. Right now, it is probably way better than it has ever been. He still gets angry, but he's learning to control that anger and express it in a more appropriate way.

He has realized how much he has hurt our family financially and is learning to manage his money a little bit, which I think is a big thing. He did have a job working in an Amazon warehouse. It lasted about six weeks, and then he quit because he is prone to back spasms, and working in the warehouse was causing him back issues. We've been trying to encourage him to get another job. And we've had some success. He's put in applications, but he hasn't gotten hired yet.

I think in general, he's growing up, which is nice to see. He still plays video games. And I still think he plays them too much. But I think it is more under control. Other times, I don't know. I think that has yet to be fully seen. There's a few successes, for sure.

My message to other parents would be to tell them that they're stronger than they will ever realize. Keep fighting for your kid. There are people out there that are willing to help, but sometimes you have to go looking for them. I have done hours and hours of research on the web looking for help. And I've met some really wonderful people.

Knowing that there are people out there and that you're not alone is huge. Sometimes it really does feel like there's nobody else going through the same situation that you are. Our family was telling us to write Andre off and that he's no good. Look for the good people out there that are willing to help and believe. Asperger Experts and other places have been invaluable to us.