School district reverses teaching cut for autistic boy
Last Updated: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 | 6:37 AM AT
CBC News
A New Brunswick school district has reversed its decision to cut a teaching assistant for a young boy with a form of autism after his education began regressing this fall.
Jeremy Soucie, 10, has Asperger's syndrome and is in Grade 4. In September, his full-time teacher's assistant was eliminated.
Administrators at School District 1, which oversees Jeremy's Moncton, N.B., school, said the constant help was no longer necessary.
Monique Robichaud, Jeremy's mother, fought the decision and warned that her son's education would slip without the help, which he had received for several years.
Once it became clear her predictions were correct, the decision was made to reinstate Jeremy's a permanent teacher's assistant again in January.
"Oh my gosh, to me it was a Christmas miracle," Robichaud said.
Without an assistant, Robichaud said her son was lost in class because he had no one to keep him involved in the class.
One week, Jeremy asked to go to the washroom 17 times.
"There was no one there to bring him back to the task at hand. Had he had that [help], I'm sure he wouldn't have missed out on a lot of instruction and education in the last four months," she said.
Goal is to make students independent
A spokesperson for School District 1 said the goal is always for students to be more independent and to reduce the amount of time they need with a teacher's aid.
But, the spokesperson said, if a student needs that aid in order to be successful, then it will always be provided.
After living through this experience, Robichaud said more weight should be given to parents when decisions about classroom assistance are made that impact on their children.
"It's welcome news but it's also bittersweet or frustrating because we had to go through that struggle and prove what we were saying all along as professionals, as parents. I know my son and I knew that would happen," she said.
Even though Jeremy will once again have an assistant with him in classes, his mother said she worries about the educational opportunities he missed in the last four months.
"He's regressed back to kindergarten level," she said.
"We've lost our investment from the last three to four years.… That's still too much, that's still a loss of our investment in his education, which was my fear all along."
