Dear Michael and Julie:

Congratulations on John on receiving the Student of the Month award! He has worked hard over the past few months and really deserves this recognition.

The enclosed student write up has been posted on the Student of the Month board at school. Please feel free to stop by and look at the entire Student of the month write-ups. The award presentation will be taking place on Thursday, April 3rd at 2:10pm in the NECC library.
We look forward to seeing you!

Student write up:

John is an active 5-year-old boy who has been a student in the Intensive Instruction since March 2007. John is very engaging and very eager to please his teachers. John is great with his PECS. He requests a variety of different edibles and activities. John will make a sentence with PECS, request attention, and approximate the sentence and hand it to the teacher for all requests throughout the day.

John has recently been introduced to a vertical schedule at school. John picked his schedule up very quickly. He has done a great job and will independently manipulate his schedule.

John is a whiz at video modeling! He has learned to play with a lot of different toys. He can construct animals with K’nex, cars with bristle blocks, robots, and potato heads. He has done a great job learning new activities quickly and generalizing them across different teachers and enviroments. John has also learned a lot of imitation skills. He can imitate 2 and 3 step gross motor sequences and is beginning to work on 2 step object imitation. John has been able to demonstrate his excellent imitation skills when his friends come to visit during reverse integration.

The preschool is very proud of John and his accomplishments, and looks forward to even more progress in the future. Great job John!

Last night on CNN, the topic on Larry King Live was Autism. Among the panel of guests were Jason McElwain and Doug Flutie who both shared their perspectives on coping with Autism. A big part of the show turned to the public debate of the impact of childhood vaccines on children later diagnosed with Autism.

I am often asked what Julie and I think about this issue as parents of a child with Autism. It’s impossible to be objective on this subject and I’ll never be close to being a medical or neurological expert, so I just lay out exactly what happened with us.

Up until the age of 18 months John’s social and language skills appeared to be developing close to a typical schedule – he had about a 20 word vocabulary including ‘Mama’, ‘Dada’, ‘hi’, ‘bye’, ‘bus’, ‘plane’, and many others. We can also distinctly remember several occasions of John interacting socially and verbally with those around him. Julie’s most vivid memories of this are at the supermarket checkout line where he would always greet the cashier with an enthusiatic “Hi!” and depart saying “Bye, Bye!” with the diction of a grade schooler. I can remember him standing on our outdoor deck and pointing to the sky and saying “plane” as one flew overhead. We also have video of John at somewhere around 14 months where he’s playing in the tub verbally responding to Mommy’s cues. We rarely play this video because it’s so tough to watch John doing things that he cannot do today – there are no words, and social interaction is absent. Doug Flutie, who went through a similar regression with his son, mirrored our sentiments on Larry King. (Paraphrasing) “It’s like we were getting a glimpse of Dougie’s true personality and it was suddenly taken away”.

John’s communicative abilities began to fade at about 19 months, exactly at the time of his MMR vaccine. Immediately after the vaccine John also exhibited physical signs of an adverse reaction – his cheeks were constantly red, and his face appeared bloated for many days. On top of this his (ex) pediatrician administered the vaccine while John was still recovering from an ear infection and still on antibiotics, which we’ve come to learn is not the best practice to say the least.

So, of course as parents it is this experience that has pretty much defined our position, which is we believe that the MMR contributed to John’s condition. Does this mean that Julie and I have hired an army of lawyers to combat the drug companies because we think John would be typical if not for these events? No. Does it mean that I’ve quit my job and become an expert on childhood vaccines to prove our case? No. Our energy is devoted to making sure John gets the best treatment and therapy for his future.

But, you can damn well bet for sure that John’s 2 and a half year old brother Will has yet to receive this vaccine, and will only do so in separate trials at a much more developed age than 18 months. But that’s just our own (and only) way of letting our past experience regarding this topic affect our decisions going forward.

John’s Individualized Education Plan has a total of 35 objectives administered among several different programs covering communication, social, behavioral, and self-help skills. He’s been on a structured program like this since the age of 3, and his schooling is year round save for the 5 weeks of vacation (never more than a week at a time) he gets per year. Needless to say, Julie and I are amazed and proud of how hard he works. We look forward to each monthly meeting to learn of his progress.

For example, one of the objectives of his “Pointing” program is “Across 2 people and 2 setting, John will point to request out of reach desired items which are up to 6 feet away in 90% of opportunities as summarized across 2 weeks.” Well, this is one of the goals he has mastered, meaning that he’s met the goal for the year way ahead of time! Of course, given the workload I’ve just described theres still plenty of work to do, especially with vocal imitation, eye contact, and self-help skills. But we’re hoping that John will continue to Master each of the goals set for these programs, and it’s his hard work and the hard work and dedication of his teachers at school that will help make this happen.

John completely enjoyed the attention he received during his special day, celebrated both at school and at home. At school his favorite part (besides the frosting on the cake) was handing out the gift bags to his classmates. And at home he received his favorite present from cousins Kailey and Liam – special placemats with pictures of his favorite farm and jungle animals.

The preschool program John attends at NECC includes monthly meetings with John’s program specialist, his primary teacher, and Mom and Dad. We cover general school behavior and very specific progress against the goals of his IEP (Individual Education Plan). Here are the highlights from the January report:

- John started reverse integration, where a typical child his age visits him in his classroom setting. This means that he’s progressed to acquire the minimum set of skills necessary to make this type of interaction worthwhile. Upon first meeting he became quite enamored with his new friend.

- Potty Training update: he’s just about 100% accident free when peeing, and during last month he initiated the trip to the bathroom instead of folloowing a regularly scheduled visit! Going #2 still is the next big challenge. We decided to try not wearing pull-ups during transition (car rides, hours around dinner time) to see if that will encourage him to produce on the potty.

- He’s been consistently using his PECs sentence strip for requests at home and school. Because John is nonverbal, PECs (Picture Exchange System) is the only way John communicates his needs. The system consists of small 2″ x 2″ laminate pictures velcroed to pages of his PECS book. Now he’s combining the pictures with a “I” and “want” picture to make a sentence strip. It’s real cute on Saturday mornings when we wake up to John standing next to us with a completed “I want Juice” sentence to start his day.