A good beginning so far

     This is my first posting on this blog.  I meant to post earlier but it has been very busy getting everyone started at school.  A lot of work went into preparing for 9th grade.  Before school even started I hashed out the behavior plan with the behaviorist and she met with all the teachers.  For some background, my son Abe (not his real name). has been in inclusion settings since kindergarten.  He is high functioning and very intelligent but clearly is still on the spectrum.  He has a 1:1 aide in school and is in all mainstream classes.  He did very well in middle school and that is why we are giving  regular high school a try.  Last year he had a rough patch and  we looked into a special education high school.  In many ways I would have loved to send him there.  He'd be safe and would actually learn some of the non academic things he needs to learn.  Abe acknowledged how perfect the school was for him but he wanted to attend the local high school.  As Abe gets older we have to take his wishes into account.  I'm proud of the fact that he feels  part of his school community and wants to go to high school with all of his classmates.
    Abe is enjoying school and so far things have been pretty good.  He's giving us a bit of a hard time about homework but I keep telling him that he is in high school and if he doesn't do it then he will have to deal with the consequences.  Of course when it gets late and he's tired he starts freaking out about not having done it.  A couple of times my husband has gotten him up early to do his homework before school. 
     One of Abe's issues is that he gets very emotional about sad material.  All of a sudden he begins sobbing.  People who say that autistic individuals don't have any feelings or emotions are way off.  When Abe was little I read an article written by a person with autism in which the person claimed that people with autism have too many emotions and therefore shut down to defend themselves.  I see this with my son.  He was much more flat when he was younger but now he reacts very strongly.  He can't protect himself from the flooding of emotions.  Of course we explained this to the teachers before school started but the teachers really don't get it.  Last week Abe gets assigned a short story that was really powerful and sad and all of a sudden he's sobbing while doing his homework. Just a week earlier the teacher was given the behavior plan in which we are supposed to be forewarned so we can prepare Abe.  No such luck.  The hard thing about H.S. is you can't have team meetings with all the teachers so easily so it is hard for me to get my message across.  I don't know how effective the behaviorist was in letting the teachers know what they need to do.   I contacted the school psychologist who was able to get me all the short stories they are reading this week.  In middle school I handed out my email and asked the teachers to please use me as a resource but only a couple of them did.  Those teachers who were good at communicating with me were so great.  Any time an issue came up we were able to quickly resolve it.  The IEP talks about home/school communication but I find that most teachers don't really want to communicate with the parents.  A quick email could solve so many problems.  In the HS they have a program where you can see the grades and can email the teachers but I don't know if the teachers check the email.  Thursday is open school night so hopefully I'll get more information then.