SPED, IEP

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For everyone with Asperger's that are still in school...Ask your parents to try to get you an IEP, or sign you up for SPED, they can really change you around 180 degrees. They give you hints on how to solve a problem. There are so many wonderful things they've done for me in SPED.

I had an IEP in middle school (because I was in the gifted program, oddly enough, not because of my AS; in Kansas they put funding for gifted programs in with special ed) and honestly it didn't do that much for me. I always just thought of it as a fairly boring meeting with my parents and my teachers.

The only problem with special ed is that most teachers are trained to teach one way which does not work for everyone. Not only that, but the funding is not available (congress for example promised to pay 40% of the costs but have barely supplied 20%).

When I was in high school, Educational Assistants were being assigned to students who needed "extra" assistance (meaning the School Board thought we couldn't do anything without someone to prod us along or we were diagnosed as having the need for support, which must be provided by law here). Eventually, because of the way I was, I just stayed in the Skills Centre (Spec. Ed Resource). When it was moved into an old double classroom, the front classroom bit ended up collecting quite a few of us who were there for extra help or just wandering through. We eventually became close friends with each other and with the support staff. When E.As were being assigned to classrooms instead of students, more people were able to access help thanks to the one or two 'disabled' students there (not many people would have passed the Health Care course at my school had the E.A placed there for me not been there, not to mention since she was a nurse, she knew more than the teacher did about almost everything....). Last year they started to create local programs for students who couldn't learn the old academic way of staring at texts and papers. The only problem there was that there were kids in there that were slower learners, people who were extremely disturbed, and they made teh mistake of putting them together with a teacher who thinks rugby is a religeon (nothing wrong with that, just this guy was aggressive). I ended up peer helping in a locally developed class too. There were two students, and there was an extreme difference between them. One wanted to learn and was amazing at math (I can't add without counting fingers), and the other was more interested in being a punk kid. The curriculum was modified the way the government wanted, but because of the small class size, we fulfilled the learning requirements with cooking (Home economics type things were offered only to Spec. Ed students, except for sewing, which was offered to 'mainstream' kids only and called Fashion Design). Even though school was h---, I went from 50% to 80-90% becasue of these people. You didn't even have to be in a class or be identified to get help from these people either. The only problem is that there aren't enough of these amazing people with the ability to care.