'Why Miss don’t want to teach me?'

DR RADICA MAHASE

“You know how hard is it for a parent to watch everybody else sending their children to school and I can’t find a school for my child?

"My child can learn. She is bright. She wants to learn and she keeps asking when she will go to school. She speaks, she can do most things by herself. She deserves a chance to get an education.

"It is years since I have been running up and down to from school to school, to the regional education office to Student Support Services. I am tired now. I just want my child to get an opportunity to learn.”

These are the words of Alcia, the mother of a 12-year-old girl. Alicia’s daughter Mia was diagnosed with autism at four. She is on the higher end of the spectrum and with the help of both speech and occupational therapy, she has been able to attend a government primary school close to her home.

For the first two years in school, Mia managed quite well. She was able to keep up with the class and interacted well enough with the other children. Her teachers were very understanding and although they both admitted that they did not know much about autism, they went the extra way to find out about it and did lots of extra activities with Mia. Mia loved going to school.

Then she went into standard one and that teacher said she didn’t have time to babysit any student and if Mia couldn't keep up with the class, then she couldn’t help her.

Mia started getting frustrated. The teacher would give her work to do and she wouldn’t finish it in time.

"We applied for a teacher’s aide for her but we were told that the Ministry of Education was not assigning aides because they didn’t have anyone.

"Mia barely passed her subjects but she was promoted to standard two. Here she was completely lost. She didn’t have a good foundation from the year before, so she started getting very low marks. She became frustrated and started getting aggressive.

"We had many meetings with the principal and her teacher. We got a tutor to work with her at home, but once she was in school and couldn’t keep up, she would get frustrated and depressed. The child that we knew from three years before disappeared in front our eyes. She would get meltdowns before school and would come home and cry.

"The teacher said that Mia could not learn and that she couldn’t waste time teaching her, that she had 25 other children in her class and she needed to focus on the ones who could learn.

"Mia would ask us, 'Why Miss don’t like me? Why Miss don’t want to teach me?'

"When we changed to online classes, we kept her in school, but it was horrible for her. She would cry all the time; she couldn’t sit for long and she couldn’t focus. She started getting meltdowns more and she said she felt stupid because she was the only student who did not know the answers and got her work wrong.

"After many meetings with the social worker and the school supervisor, because we still did not have an aide to help her, we had to take her out of public school. We started looking for a private school to send her.

"We saw so many schools coming up all over so we thought it would be easy. It isn’t, though. Two schools we checked were advertised as schools for special-needs children, but none of the teachers are qualified in special needs education or have any experience working with autistic children.

"Two others we checked we just too expensive – $1,800 and $2,000 a month for three days a week, from 9am-2 pm. One said we could pay $800 extra for Mia to get an aide. We are considering taking a loan to send her to one of these, because we have run out of options.

"I feel so very sad to see my daughter asking to go to school, asking why the teachers don’t want to help her. I keep working with her at home, I always find things for her to do. I go on YouTube and I find craft videos and all kinds of fun things. I see how good she is with her hands.

"I see a bright little girl who can do well; she just needs teachers who are willing to teach her, who will be patient and understanding. Mia just needs teachers who want to see her do well, not those who will judge her and write her off without really giving her a chance.

"We were taught that every child has a right to an education and here in TT we make a big deal about free education and all that, but that is not true at all – at least not if you have an autistic child.

"Education in this country is more a privilege than anything else. And if you don’t have money and connections and you’re not ‘somebody important,’ your autistic child will have a hard time.

"Imagine you have to consider yourself lucky if you can find a public school that will take your child and even luckier if the teachers are willing to work with your child.”

Radica Mahase is the founder/director of Support Autism T&T