I remember the phone call like it was yesterday. I was in-between classes and getting ready to go into my voice lesson when I received a call from our mother. “You have to come home. I don’t care what you have to do, you have to get home right now. I think your brother has been arrested at school.” The two hour drive home was a blur. When I get to my mother’s house, our mother was sitting on the couch crying and being comforted by our family while my brother was playing with trains on the floor, completely unfazed by what had happened. It took our family between over a month and a court trial to finally discover the entire truth behind that day.
My brother loves baseball; it is his favorite sport hands down. He would often mimic the behavior of some of his favorite baseball players and reenact specific plays. While at recess one day, another boy in this class failed at being able to hit the ball and my brother, attempting to be sympathetic towards the child, patted him on the lower back to comfort him. The child looked back at my brother and laughed, stating that he was "spanking his butt." How things escalated from there, we will never know the whole truth. All we know is that the child reported the "incident" to the school principal who then informed the school resource officer and that's when we were alerted of the situation. After all is said and done, we now have a fifth grade boy with 3rd degree sexual assault charges on his record. He needed some sort of service at this time more than ever.
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By the same time the next year, the "Autism Awareness" epidemic had begun. Every child that had any sort of abnormality was considered "autistic", movies were making jokes about people making mistakes having "autism." The word was everywhere yet no one really knew what "having autism" looked like. To be honest, even having a sibling with autism, I wasn't quite sure what it looked like. That's when I decided to make a change. I no long pursued my dream of music but instead Autism Spectrum Disorders. What I learned about autism, and I continue to learn everyday, is every child and every case is different.
