One Disaster After Another

Well, maybe "disaster" is too strong a word.  You decide.

My first day at school went very well, thanks.  My new sections of English 12 look promising, media lit will be cool, as always, and my student teacher handled her English 9s with aplomb.  Great!

Then I got home.

Sasha was already here, and difficulty #1 showed up.  I've been dealing with schedule problems because Sasha needs three courses that are only taught once per day, all ELL classes.  One of them was English Language Learner Geometry.  Another required class (Civics) was full across the board except during one period.  That locked in four of his classes.  He needed two more classes to finish out his day, but everything was full.  Not one class had a vacant seat.  I said to the counselor, "He has to have a class =somewhere=."  In the end, after much juggling, she got him a schedule and said she would email it to me.

I checked it later and saw the ELL Geometry had become regular geometry.  What the hell?  I emailed her back and said he HAS to have ELL Geometry or he'd fail.  She wrote back a while later--the geometry class he was in "has an ELL component to it."

Sasha told me he asked about this in geometry class.  Blank look from the teacher.  Additionally, the teacher said that anyone who failed algebra would also fail geometry.  He then proceeded to run an algebra review that made little sense to Sasha.

So I have to go down to the counseling office tomorrow.

While I was emailing the counselor to this effect, the phone rang.  It was Aran.  He had missed the bus and needed me to come get him.

Unhappy, I drove over to the middle school.  Aran was nowhere to be found.  Now I was getting furious.  The school had allowed a special education student to MISS THE BUS and now they had allowed him to DISAPPEAR?

I finally found him outside around a corner.  He was afraid I was upset with him, but I reassured him that I wasn't.  Then I took him inside to the office.

Keeping a firm grip on my temper, I asked the attendance secretary why an autistic student was allowed to miss the bus on his first day of school.  She said Aran had misremembered his bus number and gotten on the wrong bus on his own.  I said it shouldn't have been his responsibility in the first place--he hasn't ridden school buses since he was six, and then it was a small situation, not the big, chaotic mass of a large middle school.  "What mechanism was in place to ensure that he was on the right bus?" I asked with polite menace.

"We didn't know he needed one," she responded.

"I met with the special ed teachers extensively before school started," I nearly snarled.  "Aran was here.  It didn't occur to me that anyone would think otherwise."

At this point, a breathless aide came into the office and she basically reiterated the same thing--that Aran had mixed up his bus number and no one had realized what he had done until the bus had left.  There were a lot of adults out there with walkie-talkies who were calling the office to ask what bus numbers students had, but since Aran hadn't asked, no one knew.

"He should have been shown to his bus," I said.  "It's big, it's confusing, and these situations are doubly difficult to an autistic student."  Oh, I was angry, and they knew it.

The aide asked Aran if he knew how to find his bus number.  He couldn't tell her.  I gave the aide a blank stare.  The secretary and aide said that Aran would doubtless get on the right bus tomorrow now that he knew the right number.  I took Aran and left.  At home, I emailed a sharp letter to his special ed teacher with a CC to the assistant principal I'm friends with.  I'll follow up with a phone call tomorrow.

I also learned that there was a problem in the morning.

See, Sasha and I have to leave first in the morning.  There's an hour lag, and then Aran's bus comes, followed quickly by Maksim's.  Aran and Maksim can leave for the bus stop at the same time.  I set an alarm clock downstairs to ring eight minutes before the bus comes and went through the process last night.  I set the alarm for 6:50 p.m. (two minutes from the time we were talking) and let it ring so Aran could hear the alarm and see how to switch it off.  Then I reset the alarm for the correct morning time and took the boys through gathering up their stuff and walking down to the bus stop.

Apparently this morning, Aran took it into his head that the alarm should have gone off at 6:50 a.m. and that I hadn't set it properly.  6:50 is nearly an hour before they actually have to leave, but Aran made Mackie get his stuff and walk down to the bus stop, where they waited and waited and waited until at last the bus came.

I felt sick.  I had tried to anticipate every contingency.  I had their packs ready to go by the door.  I took them through every step.  I found neighbors who were willing to watch them with their own kids at the bus stop.  I called from school a couple minutes after they should have left to ensure they were gone.  But this one never occurred to me.  It's one of those things where autism jumps up and punches you in the gut and sings,  "Ha ha!"

All I can do is have them try again tomorrow.  I showed Aran the correct time and explained to him what happened.  Now I'm going to be a wreck tomorrow, wondering if they get it right.

And Mackie didn't eat lunch today because he left his in the classroom and was too scared to ask the teacher if he could get it.

I need to leave my job and handle my kids, but there's no way to do it.