Sorry, I should have written about this weeks ago. I've been neglecting the blog, I'm going to try to update more regularly. I'm going to be publishing an update about the iPod and how that is going shortly (spoiler: it's great!)
After Joseph's assessment in December at the autism center, I went back for the feedback meeting to get their impressions. They have confirmed the diagnosis of autism, and are classifying him as severe. Their said this is not because of the severity of his individual symptoms, but rather because of the large number of symptoms he exhibits. They said that the symptoms seem to be slight, and they are optimistic that he will be able to overcome them. He wasn't entirely cooperative during the intelligence test, but when they threw out one anomalously low scoring category, his IQ is testing in the average range.
So here's our plan. We don't want to take him out of Dublin's schools, especially from his current teacher and classroom. EIBI, Early Intensive Behavior Intervention, which is derived from Applied Behavior Analysis, is considered to be the most effective treatment for kids with autism (in general, there are of course plenty of exceptions). But it requires 20 to 40 hours a week for maximum benefit. We could get that if we took him out of public school and sent him to a center like Haugland, Step by Step or Helping Hands or took him out of school and "home-schooled" him, which would allow us to use Ohio's $20k a year Autism Scholarship to pay for the aides to work with him. Or we can try to do it at home, after school, with the help of unpaid aides (Medicaid covers everything but the aides who do the actual therapy sessions), which is what we want to try to do right now.
The next step, they will do an intake assessment with Joseph at the autism center to begin designing his treatment plan.
This sounds like mostly good news. Have you connected with other parents whose children are in the same program as Joseph?
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I've talked with other parents whose kids are doing ABA at home. I don't think that I've talked to any that are doing it exactly the way we're planning to do it, but this doctor at Children's said it should work well, so we're optimistic.
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