Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Families of Children with Invisible Disabilities and sensory differences meet the start of each school year with dread rather than relief, and that dread is earned. The piece comes from a speech language pathologist who is Autistic and who works daily with neurodivergent children and young adults, and it describes classrooms run by adults who do not understand neurodivergence and who, in plain terms, often do not believe in it. Students register everything about how a room receives them. They know who treats them as safe, who likes them, and who is waiting to pass them along as someone else's problem. The author recalls being eleven, an academically successful and rule following student, and sensing that her fifth grade teacher had turned cold toward her, speeding past her when calling on the row and reaching instead for a classmate she preferred to hear from. Her reading of that room was correct, and she carried it home to her bedroom every afternoon. The bullying and exclusion that Students with Disabilities encounter in classrooms originates with the adults who set the tone, never with the children reading it accurately.
Being socially unwanted at school is not a passing discomfort, and the numbers make that plain. People with Autism die by suicide at close to triple the rate of people who are not Autistic, and that figure climbs past five times among those who do not also have an intellectual disability, meaning the sharpest danger falls on the very students society reads as fine rather than on those with significant cognitive disabilities or global developmental delays. A study conducted in Taiwan, which did not include nonspeaking Students with Autism or students who use extensive daily services, found that among Autistic students harassed by a teacher, 53.8 percent reported suicidality, and that such harassment corresponded to roughly seven times the odds of it. The author states directly that society's response to neurodivergence carries life or death consequences. Students placed in rooms where an adult treats them as a burden are students who feel that they do not belong in the room, and the harm that follows is counted in lives.
On an ordinary day, neurodivergent students describe environments that press in on them. Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder speak of boredom, of going unheard, and of forcing themselves through class periods that leave them nowhere to move. Students with Autism describe sensory overload, social mistreatment, and the dysregulation that arrives when a familiar routine is broken without warning. The author's stepson had built a routine around the school vacuum, an activity he had chosen, enjoyed, and looked forward to, and one afternoon access to it was simply cut off with no explanation offered, leaving him confused and doubting he belonged there at all. Other students are denied the fidget tools they use to regulate and focus, told by teachers that these are toys rather than recognized as the tools they are. Parents are handed reports saying their child was difficult and behaving in typical form for that child, language that fixes a student as unlikeable before the next day begins. One neurodivergent student watched a teacher throw their books onto the floor.
Children learn exclusion by watching adults practice it. The author's six year old came home and reported that his teacher did not like a new classmate who had joined near the end of the year, and when asked how he knew, he said she rolled her eyes at that student repeatedly. How an adult regards a person shapes tone, action, and the safety a room gives off, and every other person present absorbs that lesson. The author's counsel to teachers runs the other direction: give two deliberate minutes to the student who most frustrates you, find the two minutes where the class clown with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can shine, laugh alongside that student, and send the message that you see them and value who they are, because people who feel seen feel safe and connected. That principle governs every gathering a community holds, not classrooms alone. Inclusion is not a product to be purchased or handed off to someone else; it is a shared responsibility owned personally by each of us, and Community Builders working toward Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities meet it by creating a sincere sense of Community Belonging for People with Disabilities when planning any activity or gathering. People with Disabilities belong to their communities by right, and that right obligates every planner to build the social life of an event around them from the first decision forward, to give their perspective decisive weight in what gets planned, and to treat their full participation as the measure of whether the gathering succeeded at all.
Read the Full Article: Is Anyone Else Dreading Back-To-School Season Because Your Child Is Misunderstood There?.
By: Meg Raby
