Reply to Anyone BTDT? Autism/Not-Autism? Starting Kindergarten Next Year

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Reply to "Anyone BTDT? Autism/Not-Autism? Starting Kindergarten Next Year"

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[quote=Anonymous]I went through all of this with my son (who is now 15.)  He didn't talk much as a preschooler but what he did say was clear and age appropriate and he taught himself to read at age 3, so I just assumed that he wasn't a talker. In K, his teachers began giving us a lot of feedback about poor eye contact and poor social skills and lagging language skills. We started the evaluation process when he was 5. We have seen a psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities, a developmental pediatrician,  a neuropsychologist, school psychologists, and several speech/language therapists. He has been variously diagnosed with Mixed Expressive-Receptive Language disorder, Semantic-Pragmatic Language Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

We tried him in private school and paid OOP for speech therapy and social skills classes and drama therapy. We found that the private school just didn't have the resources or the staff trained to help him enough. We moved him to public school and it worked much better. Our public school had more resources: a school psychologist and an ST and a special education resource teacher and a resource room  for when he needed breaks. The special education resource teacher, the school psychologist, and the ST were able to help his teacher in the regular classroom with managing him and his special needs in the classroom. It worked much better.  He was in the regular classroom about 75% -80% of the time and in pull-outs the rest of the time.  He progressed beautifully and in 8th grade he no longer needed an IEP.  He continues to have a 504 in high school, just in case, but he does very well without much special education support now.  We did some behavior therapy with him, but did not do an ABA program per se because it wasn't appropriate for him.

As far as diagnosis goes, I would just address the deficits in front of you without worrying too much about labels.  My kid seemed more MERLD than ASD when he was 5, but as his language skills improved, he seemed much more ASD.  Lots of kids seem more ASD, but then as they progress it becomes clear they aren't autistic, but have some language disorder instead.  It will work itself out.  
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