Autism: The Evaluation
This was a day we had looked toward for a long time. Partly it was a day of anxiety, but mostly it was a day of vindication and relief. It was the day our youngest was evaluated for Autism.
Our oldest son has Autism, and since the youngest was born we had thought that he might have it as well. But things were different, because he was more free with eye contact than our oldest, and more likely to interact and smile with you. What he didn't get was speech. Sure, he could talk a little bit, and learned a couple of phrases, but he was also losing words and the phrases didn't make any sense. We therefore were concerned that his behaviors were not learned from his older brother, but rather inherent.
The Granite School District in Salt Lake City, Utah, is the largest school district in the State. As such, they have a lot of funding that they can then apply to evaluation and special education. It was at their offices our evaluation took place. We took Scott in after getting Jonathan on the bus for school, and started with filling out paperwork. The speech pathologist came in and started working with Scott as we ran through behavior ratings. The school psychologist observed him here with us, as well as tried to give our son an intelligence test. It didn't work, however, as our son refused to attend at all to the task at hand.
We then filled out an Autism Spectrum survey, as the psychologist saw the signs we had believed we saw. The survey was pretty straightforward, without a lot of detail to cover with which we were not already familiar because of our oldest son. After two hours of evaluations and questions about Scott's behavior at home and at school, they took the evaluations back and started to score them. It took about an hour or so, during which I got to play with my son up and down the hall in a quiet section of the offices. We then had Scott's hearing tested (just to be sure), and they returned with their evaluations.
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