♪♪
Linda McTaggart: When the two were born
they did everything on time, crawled, walked,
rolled over, everything was pretty much almost a
week apart between the two.
I can't even tell you when he really went downhill.
All of a sudden it just seemed like Jack just was
miserable.
And that's what is hard, your child is developing
right along and all of a sudden they just kind of
go down.
♪♪
Find the paper.
Can you color?
Linda: Jack is three years old.
He loves to color, which is a new thing that he's
just getting into.
He's starting to clap, which he never did before,
and stomp his feet once in a while.
There are certain songs that he really loves.
♪♪If you're happy and you know it then your face♪♪
♪♪will surely show it.♪♪
♪♪If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.♪♪
Linda: When Jack was little we couldn't even
get him to sit.
He would just run off and be crying.
He didn't want to sit and do anything, didn't play
with toys appropriately.
And now if you give him a reinforcer like his shaker
he'll sit.
♪♪
Linda: In my immediate family is my
husband Shawn and we have a six-year-old Max.
My oldest son Max is on the autism spectrum as
well.
And the Jack has a twin sister, Josie.
All done.
No, you're not all done.
Yeah!
Linda: Where he's at now is he loves school.
For him to take the numbers 1 through 10 and
they can be mixed up and he can line them up, a
year ago I wouldn't have thought he could do that.
Good for you!
Linda Pawson: Jack is a kindergartner here at
Northeast Elementary School and he's in the
general classroom I would say about 80% of his day
and then he comes in here for a lot of intense
one-on-one work with his goals right now.
Jack right now is non-verbal, that is how I
would classify him.
He does have some words but he's not using them to
communicate so much as he's using them just to
identify certain things around the room.
Pig, pig, pig.
Pig.
Pawson: Jack's strengths right now in the classroom
are his letters and numbers.
He is really just fascinated by letters and
numbers.
It seems to be characteristic of children
with autism that they do like numbers because the
order of numbers is never going to change.
He is using a piece of assisted technology right
now.
He has had it for about four weeks.
If you want a drink, tell me drink.
Drink, please and thank you.
Good job, Jack.
One of the biggest things that I would like to see
for Jack is for him to have a way to communicate.
Right now he's not able to let us know I'm hurt or I'm
sick or I'm hungry or I'm grumpy right now, just
leave me alone.
He doesn't have a way to say those things.
Linda: Jack has a one-on-one associate,
which he needs because of the fact that he could run
off at any point if somebody wasn't watching
him.
And still he's not completely potty trained
so he needs help with that.
Potty training is like my next goal that I would
love to have done.
That's you!
Linda: Keep working on the speech.
I've heard him say words.
He has said words at school so I know he can
speak, it's just getting it out of him.
He's just a happier child and the earlier you can
start doing intervention the better.
That has been huge for Jack.
When we started I thought, oh.
His goal was to get him to sit for 10 minutes without
crying or running off.
And then today you see him and he'll sit and do work.
♪♪
Linda: Safety is the biggest thing,
especially for a child like Jack, and that is why
we do swimming lessons because we want to make
sure that he's able, if he gets in a pool or gets
into a pond or something, that he can get up and get
back to the side, like if he fell off a dock or
something, because that was my biggest fear.
♪♪
Heather Lynam: I have had Jack on
my roster for the last year and a half.
When I first got him as an eighth grader he was
displaying some more negative behaviors whereas
he was maybe having some self-injurious behaviors.
He got upset, he would maybe hit his head a
little bit.
He had, we called them vocal aggressions.
(vocal aggression)
You're okay.
Heather: Sometimes he would leave the area where
he was supposed to be because something else was
bothering him or he wanted to just get out of work.
Jack, over here.
Get your tray.
It's okay.
Get your tray.
What animal?
Yeah.
You say it.
Pig.
Heather: We're working on him communicating more, so
rather than the behaviors being the form of
communication, we're having him use his
augmentative alternative communication device to
say what might be bothering him or ask for a
break.
I would describe him as low verbal.
So he has the ability to speak and we hear that
often in little snippets or short little phrases or
one word answers.
Rabbit.
Good.
Rabbit.
Good trying, Jack.
Heather: But when it comes to having a conversation,
that is something at this point in time he still has
a little bit of a wall in front of him that we need
to help him jump over.
Hands down.
Nice hands.
Heather: One of the things that Jack does
communicatively is he reverses his sounds or
he'll put an initial sound at the end of a word.
So saying fish is very hard for Jack, it sounds
like sh-shish, because he's not sure about
exactly where to have proper mouth placement.
Fish.
Yes, there it was!
You got your sounds.
Good job, Jack!
Heather: I would say Jack's area of strength is
doing work tasks that are very repetitive, that have
a clear answer.
Fourteen.
High five, good job.
Sixty-three.
High five!
Good job!
Heather: He needs to know here's how I start it,
here's exactly how I do it and here's how I end it.
You do see that no matter what abilities or
disabilities the students have they are teenagers so
they're going to have the same feelings that a
neurotypical student might have.
Jack also sometimes struggles with
understanding social cues from other people.
One of the biggest challenges is he has
feelings that he doesn't know how to appropriately
display and communicate with us.
So we're trying to help him navigate when you're
frustrated this is what you could do.
Heather: We also really hit up the living
component where we're working on hygiene or
living skills.
And one of the big living skills for Jack is making
his lunch.
So we're trying to help him understand it's your
lunch, you need to be the one that makes it, because
as an adult if he's hungry I want him someday to be
able to go to the kitchen and do it on his own.
It's scary at times to think about that.
But it's a skill that he needed to have last year.
♪♪
Where was this child as a three-year-old?
As a seven-year-old?
As an eighth grader?
♪♪
Heather: Everything we do and all
of the goals from here on out are very much aligned
to what does Jack hope for himself in the future,
what do parents hope for him in the future and how
can we meld those into applicable goals that will
make a different for him for the rest of his life.
Linda: Probably down the road when he's 18, 19, 20,
if he's still where he needs full-time care what
do you do?
Is there places that he can live, that he can have
help where he can go out and get a job and come
back and live somewhat independently?
That's probably the biggest goal and the
biggest fear.
♪♪
This program is part of the Move to Include
Initiative made possible with support from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private
corporation funded by the American people.
♪♪
The Max and Helen Guernsey Charitable
Foundation, in support of educational programming on
statewide Iowa Public Television.
♪♪