I wonder how many parents take for granted that they can just drop their kids off at school or send them out the door to a bus stop and know that their kiddo is going to swim along through the year just fine without anything outside the expected start of the school year traditions being done. They buy some supplies if they can afford to. Maybe they show up at the open house, maybe they don’t, but their kiddo is going to just dive right in, floating and swimming through anything new.

For a kiddo like my son, who has level 3 Autism, a couple genetic disorders and so much more, any school change takes a great deal of preparation. He can’t just show up without having seen the location and be calm or functional. Same for any classroom change.

As we look to next year, where his teacher and his classroom will be changing, the preparation for that has already begun. We talked about it first. Then we walked to the classroom and stood outside. I showed him pictures at later points and we talked about it. Then we did walk throughs where he didn’t need to sit. Yesterday, he sat in there for five minutes before school began working on some functional tasks while we talked about this being his new classroom in August.

For summer school, we’ve had two tours thanks to the graciousness of that facility’s principal. The intent was to increase his exposure in a couple ways. The first tour, I just took pictures, the other kiddos were gone, and he didn’t have functional expectations. The second tour was structured with short educational tasks, a visual schedule that needed to be followed, token boards, reinforcers…basically it was a practice run through some of things that might happen over summer school while other kiddos were still at the school. The principal said he crushed it on that tour, and I agree.

None of that would have been possible without the generous support of the school staff involved in making the time and allowing us to do that, and we are extremely grateful. Without it, my son likely wouldn’t be swimming through his first week of summer school, he’d be floundering. And even with that, I still have to make and maintain token boards, social stories, visual schedules, extra sets of pictures and visual aides for when he’s so overwhelmed he’s not processing language and needs a picture to show him where he needs to go or what he needs to do.

When just a change of classroom can sink a kiddo, a whole lot of work is needed to help them swim.