Parents, schools work for the best learning experience
When Joey Tonascia started in the early childhood education
program through the Hollister School District, his mother, Karen
Tonascia, said the teachers weren’t quite sure what to do with
him.
Parents, schools work for the best learning experience
When Joey Tonascia started in the early childhood education program through the Hollister School District, his mother, Karen Tonascia, said the teachers weren’t quite sure what to do with him.
After two years of tantrums and knowing something just wasn’t quite right with her son, doctors had diagnosed him with a pervasive development disorder.
“[Joey] was on the higher functioning scale of what they [the teachers] were used to,” Tonascia said. “Just because he was one of the few [kids] with autism, they weren’t specialized in it. There wasn’t any curriculum. They needed to learn how to educate these kids.”
Cindy Alcantara, a program specialist with the Hollister School District, has been working with autistic children for 15 years. Like Tonascia, she has seen an increase in the number of local children diagnosed with autism.
“When I first started, we had maybe one child per year,” Alcantara said. “Now we have close to 30 children.”
Most educators, doctors and scientists agree that more children are diagnosed with autism now than 20 years ago despite different theories about why that might be.
In the early 1990s, the American Psychiatric Association changed the diagnostic criteria for autism and added a variety of disorders to the spectrum. One of the changes included ways to diagnose milder forms of autism such as Asperger’s syndrome. Since the change, 1 in 166 children are diagnosed with autism, according to the National Institute for Mental Health.
Nationwide, special education programs serve more than 220,000 children with autism. The number of children now diagnosed has led to better education in some places, such as San Benito.
Tonascia watched the autism program – and her son – evolve through the years. At first the teachers worked with him on speech therapy and on socialization. In second grade, Joey still couldn’t spend more than 10 minutes in a normal class without melting down, his mother said.
“He was in a special day class and [the school district] really worked with me,” Tonascia said. “But when I felt it wasn’t a good place for him anymore, they were willing to work with me to get him mainstreamed.”
By third grade, with the help of an aide, Joey had made the transition to a mainstream classroom.
One of the struggles for the Hollister School District in meeting the needs of families such as the Tonascias is that every child is different.
“Each kid has unique needs,” said Karen Twaddell, the director of student services for the Hollister School Distinct. “We can’t provide one program. We have to tailor programs to each.”
Programs start early
Education for children with specialized needs, such as Nathan Coronado who was diagnosed with autism last spring, does not start when children enter kindergarten. The school district provides an early childhood education program for infants and toddlers, preschoolers and then special day programs for school age children who can’t be placed full time in a mainstream classroom.
For Nathan, much of his day is spent learning to socialize with other children and his teachers.
“He can count, but they are teaching him to stay seated and follow directions,” said his mother, Victoria Coronado. “They are teaching him how to be in a school environment and to follow the same routine every day.”
One day before class started, Nathan walked along a balance beam in class, dressed in shiny shoes and a button down shirt with his hair parted on the side. Sometimes he sits on a balance ball with a teacher, a step toward increasing his interaction with other people.
Coronado has had a good experience with the school district, which enrolled Nathan in the autism preschool program shortly after his diagnosis.
“His teacher and I have been cohesive,” Coronado said.
In order to place the children in the right program, the school district reviews doctor’s notes, interviews the family and does their own testing.
“We do a full assessment of language, cognition and development,” Alcantara said. “We sit down with the parents and develop a plan. The most important thing is to develop an Individual Education Program based on their needs.”
As part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, all school districts are required to provide the best education they can for children with special needs, whether their challenges are physical or mental.
A balancing act
The IEP is what allows Joey Tonascia and Rachel Holt, an 8-year-old Hollister girl also diagnosed with autism, to have aides at their side during school. It allows Joey to skip history lessons since he struggles to process all the information during that period.
“History was getting to really be a big problem,” Tonascia said. “We decided it was just too much so now he’s not doing history and he uses that time to catch up with other things he has to do.”
Joey’s IEP does not require him to leave his classroom for special services.
“I decided not to because whenever he was pulled out, he had a hard time getting back into where the class was,” Tonascia said.
For the Holt family, Rachel’s IEP allows her out of the classroom for speech therapy. But things haven’t always gone smoothly for the family. At one point, Rachel missed several months of math.
“She has speech and they took her out at math to do her therapy,” her father, Duane Holt, said. “We had to fight to get her extra math help.”
Eventually, the school doubled up her hours with math to make up for the lost time. Still Holt spends plenty of time working with his daughter on language and math at home. Holt also created a book of flash cards when Rachel had trouble remembering rhyming words. The book allows Rachel to pick an ending for a rhyme such as “at” and then she can flip through and make words such as “cat,” “sat,” “that.” With an abacus, Rachel is a pro with math.
“The school system said as she gets older, the gap [between Rachel and other children] will get bigger,” Holt said. “I fear algebra and fractions.”
Even with their work at home, Holt researches changes to the laws around IEPs and keeps tuned into what is going on at school.
“They [the district] have trouble complying with the IEP,” Holt said. “They have a history of it, so we are going to set our goals high.”
The school does try to make sure the children get everything they need, Twaddell said.
“It is a balancing act,” she said. “It’s a team arrangement. A child could need speech therapy or occupational therapy or adapted PE.”
With autistic children, the school tries to balance a need for social interaction with the education, according to Stephen McKeon, a program specialist for the Hollister School District.
“A lot of what we do is to address language delays and socialization,” McKeon said. “We want to create independence and keep them moving forward.”
One way the school district assesses their progress is through a minimum of one meeting a year with families to reevaluate the IEP. Parents or teachers, and even the student when they get old enough, can call for an IEP meeting throughout the year.
“We set goals to identify what the students need,” McKeon said. “We know they are being successful when they’ve met these goals.”
Though the school officials couldn’t talk about specific goals because of confidentiality issues, they did say that most of the goals for the autistic children are around social communication, such as initiating interactions with friends.
While the goal is to get all children to reach their highest potential and into a mainstream classroom, some children with more severe autism are relegated to special day classes. In these classes, children learn math and reading, but the education is more functional
“They might learn how to read signs,” McKeon said. “Or in math they learn how to handle money.”
Their long history with autism is what keeps McKeon and Alcantara working with the families and children. They worry over setbacks and cheer over triumphs with each family.
“It is really satisfying watching the growth,” McKeon said. “I’ve seen some of the kids start at 3 and now they are going into high school.”
Joey Tonascia is one of those kids who will be on his way to high school in a few more years, with the help of his family and his educators.
“It’s kind of one of those relationships where you get what you put into it,” Tonascia said. “Be proactive. If you want what is best for your kid, work with them and they are going to help you.”
Melissa Flores can be reached at mf*****@pi**********.com.
