Our Journey Begins

Hello, my name is Krista. I have four children who are currently ages eleven, thirteen, almost seventeen and eighteen. My youngest daughter Valerie is eleven and is what most would consider to be severely autistic. She is verbal, but her language is about equal to that of a three year old. She has echolalia, which means she repeats what other people say. Most of her non-schooling time is spent playing with ropes, shoelaces, string ect. That is what is calming to her. She will occasionally slap, hit , pinch or even cut herself when she feels that she is under stress. In fact, it was this self destructive behavior of hers that led my husband and I to remove her from the public schools and begin home educating her.

I had mentioned the possibility of homeschooling her a few times to my husband over the years. He had some incorrect information about the homeschool laws in Florida, but a call to the Home School Legal Defense Association cleared that up. He still had some concerns though .

Valerie also has sensory issues. She cannot tolerate loud noises and now wears rifle range earmuffs to help her filter through the sounds she hears. Her sensory issues were not a noticeable problem until last school year when she simply could not board the school bus. Dan (My husband and the kids father)and I did not know what was wrong. She began panicking and screaming when I tried to put her on the bus in the morning. We live near a small town and the school she attended was forty-five minutes away. I drove her to school for two weeks while the folks at school tried to work with her about the bus issue. They did eventually get her to board the school bus for about six weeks, then Valerie refused again.

The school system sent out behavioral specialists to our home to attempt to get her to board the school bus. More screaming and panicking occured. Frankly, I was surprised that no one called the police on us. Her screams were that bad. Dan and I voiced our observations that Valerie reacts to stress by injuring herself and we were not afraid to tell the behavior specialists when enough was enough. We never did it in a rude way, just "She has had enough", or something like that. They did not like that ,but did as we requested. None of their ideas worked for Valerie .To be honest, they had not tried anything that I had not tried already.

Several weeks later we conferred with several school officials in a meeting that we are still upset about to this day. We were basically told that they believed that our autistic daughter was just trying to "get her way"and not go to school. Again , we shared our observations about Valeries self injurous behavior when placed under stress, and were completely disregarded. In short, they let us know that they were prepared to "force the issue"with her and that if we did not cooperate then any absenses from then on would be considered unexcused.Needless to say Dan and I were very unhappy at this point. After the fatefull meeting we decided to pull her out of school right away and begin homeschooling her.