Reply to Which traditional privates take very high functioning Kids with autism

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Fear of stigma is far worse than actual stigma because it keeps parents from giving their children what they need. This is not directed at OP, who didn't raise the issue of stigma. But I have seen parents make terrible mistakes because of some overblown fear that sending their child to a school that can actually support their needs will somehow harm them. 
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12:29, without questioning that this might be your experience ours was very different.  We opted in favor of the additional services in an SN setting trusting that when the time came to make a switch our child's positive attributes and strong capabilities would be appreciated and our decision to get some extra early help understood in context.  But we had one hell of a time getting accepted at a mainstream school afterward despite strong test scores across the board.  Friends of ours who redacted info about SN background did much better even in instances where their children had significantly more serious challenges. Fortunately after beating our heads against the wall for a while we found a school that was not so closed-minded.  Our child immediately did great, as we knew they would -- performing at the top of the class academically and being popular socially.  There is absolutely no doubt in our mind that our child would also have performed well at several of the other schools we looked at if they had not been blinded by the SN background.

Bottom line is that we pooh-poohed the concern about stigma for a long time and almost undercut our child's future opportunities as a result.

Even beyond this we learned that when we didn't provide background info to teachers (for example extracurricular), expectations were kept high and our child did very well in their classes.  We only ran into problems when our child's background followed them around.

And frankly we got some bad advice about this from professionals; professionals have a particular take on things because they work with these kids and assume that because they don't stigmatize such kids that others won't.  Our experience shows that to be incorrect.

I'm not suggesting that people should deny their kids needed support.  We didn't deny that to our child and I wouldn't recommend anyone else doing so. But the idea that there is no stigma out there is, we have found, naive and wrong.  There's a ton of it. Admissions people may say there isn't, but they are human, and there is.

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