Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:19:29, all of those schools have a few kids with ASDs. I know this for a fact. However, they don;t have kids who specifically need social support, beyond what other students have. I don't think they would accept such a student.

You are probably correct. I'm sure there are a few spectrum kids at all of these schools, but what the OP envisions in terms of social support:

"As for what supports I'd like. Right now at school she meets with the school social worker who helps her talk through times she missed social cues or was upset by something she didn't understand socially. Stuff like that..."

is not going to happen at any of them. That's why OP needs to re-think the SN school.

I'm PP and I agree completely. None of these schools will do this. As for the poster who said that if they have students with ASDs by definition they do this, absolutely not. I have a child with an ASD at one of these schools, doing fine, but with nothing like this. if your DC needs any social supports beyond what they do for anyone else, none of these schools will provide that. My point with my pervious post is that kids with ASDs are at these schools, contrary to what another poster said.

Anonymous wrote:What about Green Acres?

No no no no no

What about Green Acres?

Anonymous wrote:19:29, all of those schools have a few kids with ASDs. I know this for a fact. However, they don;t have kids who specifically need social support, beyond what other students have. I don't think they would accept such a student.

You are probably correct. I'm sure there are a few spectrum kids at all of these schools, but what the OP envisions in terms of social support:

"As for what supports I'd like. Right now at school she meets with the school social worker who helps her talk through times she missed social cues or was upset by something she didn't understand socially. Stuff like that..."

is not going to happen at any of them. That's why OP needs to re-think the SN school.

Not 19:29 and I happen to know at least two of those schools that have ASD kids and by definition they all need social supports -- maybe they don't consider it a priority so the parents so ask but trust me they could all use it. By the way, there are plenty of NT kids at my kids school that could use social supports. We point to kids with ASD as having social communication problems, but those are not the kids that are bullying, making fun of, or excluding children.... they could all have a positive benefit of the other kids despite their own challenges.

19:29, all of those schools have a few kids with ASDs. I know this for a fact. However, they don;t have kids who specifically need social support, beyond what other students have. I don't think they would accept such a student.

Just as a clarification, the OP's consultant didn't recommend Burke. I did b/c it is academically rigorous, has a small class size, and openly talks about accommodations (obviously not specific to ASD), whereas Sheridan and Lowell don't. (I have toured the other schools but not Burke.)

Anonymous wrote: I would like to add something about the very small schools suggested to you. I have experience with three of them and my kids are middle school ages, so I think it is pretty valid. (I am just noting that fact because sometimes you get anecdotes from parents with younger children at these schools...YMMV.)

To me, when you say social problems, that crosses the small schools (Field, Burke, Sheridan, Lowell) off the list. I say this because the social environment at these schools is very small. At middle school there may only be a dozen children of the same sex at the school. Using that tiny population to address social skills is problematic. First, many of the kids have been together years,so it can be hard to integrate anyhow. Second, there may only be one or two kids that your child enjoys due to the sheer lack of variety/type of kid that is there. We have found this to be the case with NT kids and SN kids alike. It is just a fishbowl.

I would personally look at schools that have bigger classes if I wanted to fix social issues.

Sheridan parent above, also Burke parent here. They are trying to increase the size of the middle school at Burke, but right now the classes are very small. I think Burke is great, but, middle schoolers don't interact in classroom settings with a lot of different types of kids. There is a lot of support for lots of kids at Burke, but I can't imagine they'd be wiling to take on an ASD kid. The school isn't big enough to have the resources for everything. My DC has mild ADHD and we included the neuropsych report with the application. It was a risk to include that, but we couldn't risk DC going to a school that didn't have some supports for his needs. His needs are met by being able to use his laptop to type everything instead of handwriting and by getting extra time on tests. Those needs were easily met.

Have you told your consultant everything about the diagnosis? I can't imagine a consultant saying to apply to Field, Burke, Sheridan, or Lowell with a diagnosis of ASD. They aren't big enough to offer support with social issues. I also have trouble with the idea of a consultant recommending against McLean in your case. I'd get clarification on the exact nature of the diagnosis and exactly what supports need to be in place to support your child. Once you know what the needs are, look for schools that can meet those needs.

As to *how* the girls, not "now"

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: I would like to add something about the very small schools suggested to you. I have experience with three of them and my kids are middle school ages, so I think it is pretty valid. (I am just noting that fact because sometimes you get anecdotes from parents with younger children at these schools...YMMV.)

To me, when you say social problems, that crosses the small schools (Field, Burke, Sheridan, Lowell) off the list. I say this because the social environment at these schools is very small. At middle school there may only be a dozen children of the same sex at the school. Using that tiny population to address social skills is problematic. First, many of the kids have been together years,so it can be hard to integrate anyhow. Second, there may only be one or two kids that your child enjoys due to the sheer lack of variety/type of kid that is there. We have found this to be the case with NT kids and SN kids alike. It is just a fishbowl.

I would personally look at schools that have bigger classes if I wanted to fix social issues.

This is a really good point. We've seen the best and worst of very small schools for my DS with an ASD. When it goes well, its a very nurturing community thats not overwhelming. But when it goes bad there is no way to escape, no way to find fresh friends. The only way is out, changing schools.

That's where measuring twice, cutting once helps. If OP is looking for social supports in middle school, she'd be better off in a small school (the right one) or SN school.

That's sweet but there is simply no way, none, to predict how a brand new middle schooler will integrate with an existing, tiny group of girls.

You can't "measure twice" accurately as an outsider or as the parent. You can only guess and given that these are 12-13 yr old girls, your predictive abilities as to now the group dynamics will shake out are necessarily weak.

If you have a kid who has trouble making friends, then looking for someplace that goes through 12 is probably a good thing.

Field and Burke both start in 6th and have their fair share of quirky kids but everyone seems to find their own niche.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: I would like to add something about the very small schools suggested to you. I have experience with three of them and my kids are middle school ages, so I think it is pretty valid. (I am just noting that fact because sometimes you get anecdotes from parents with younger children at these schools...YMMV.)

To me, when you say social problems, that crosses the small schools (Field, Burke, Sheridan, Lowell) off the list. I say this because the social environment at these schools is very small. At middle school there may only be a dozen children of the same sex at the school. Using that tiny population to address social skills is problematic. First, many of the kids have been together years,so it can be hard to integrate anyhow. Second, there may only be one or two kids that your child enjoys due to the sheer lack of variety/type of kid that is there. We have found this to be the case with NT kids and SN kids alike. It is just a fishbowl.

I would personally look at schools that have bigger classes if I wanted to fix social issues.

This is a really good point. We've seen the best and worst of very small schools for my DS with an ASD. When it goes well, its a very nurturing community thats not overwhelming. But when it goes bad there is no way to escape, no way to find fresh friends. The only way is out, changing schools.

My DH and his brother who would both qualify for being on the spectrum went K-12 at a elite mainstream private school when ASDs were not diagnosed. They both did well academically and socially and went on to an Ivy for college where they did well and went on to Ivy grad schools. It's the luck of the draw, I guess. DH still has friends from his early school days and he's in his fifties.

We have a son on the spectrum like OP's daughter - does very well academically and without behavior issues whose developmental pediatrician is insisting we change to a SN school for the social curriculum. DS currently attends a mainstream language immersion charter.

I am torn on what we should do so I really sympathize with OP. What we are doing is to have a vote of the experts, developmental pediatrician, neuropsych and educational consultant. We have everyone go observe DS and give a recommendation: 2 out of 3 votes wins.

Good luck, OP!

PP who said feAr of stigma is a problem, again. We did it both ways. At DC 's first school we kept the diagnosis a secret and referred more generally and descriptively to issues. This was very stressful as I spent a lot of time fearing they would find out, especially when he demonstrated some needs. I regretted the secrecy, it just wasn't worth it. At second, mainstream, mainstream school we put everything on the table including the ASD diagnosis. He was accepted and I am so much more relaxed when I speak with teachers.

I realize this is only our experience but I do know of kids with ASD diagnosed at most of the area mainstream privates .

PP here, just following up my own post. I do want to be clear that we don't regret getting the SN services, which were enormously helpful. If we had to do it over again the only thing we might have changed was to leave the SN environment a year earlier. Even that is not certain. But we definitely would have been wise to cast our net wider and be more cognizant of the prejudice that is out there.

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.