Homeschooling Autistic Children

Recently I decided to rebuild a homeschooling website that I had up on the internet sometime ago. I took it down for a handful of reasons, all of them the wrong ones. I have set to work rebuilding it. One of the things that I was upset that I lost was an article that I wrote for the website on homeschooling autistic children, something that I know more than a little about. I remembered my husband telling me about a page called The Wayback Machine that allows you to retrieve internet archives. I was able to find that article to repost it. As I was looking it over today I realized that I originally wrote that article in 2002. In the last five years a lot has changed.

The statistics that I have listed in the article is that 1 in 500 children have some form of autism. Today that number is 1 in 150. Autism has reached epidemic proportions and recently there has been an insurgence of arguments about the cause. Everything from vaccines to genetics has been blamed. No one knows the cause but what everyone with an autistic child can agree that autistic children present their own educational challenges. There isn't a day that goes by that I do not hear the story of a parent fighting to get a proper Individual Educational Plan (IEP) in place for their child.

Even with the number of cases of autism skyrocketing, many public school teachers are not trained to teach autistic children and yet these children are mainstreamed without the things in place to make not only the teachers job easier but make it able for the autistic child to cope with his environment and learn. Every time I read a news article about an autistic child being locked up in a closet for disciple, duct taped to a chair, or improperly restrained in some other manner I am thankful that I am able to homeschool.