[Take the Next Step] Ep 12 • When Special Education Works with Adrian Wood

Exciting news! New episodes are dropping on my Take the Next Step podcast, and I’m sharing this one here so you won’t miss out. Be sure to follow Take the Next Step with Amy Julia Becker wherever you listen so you are sure to get future episodes. https://pod.link/1838911087

More about Take the Next Step: amyjuliabecker.com/step/

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What if inclusion in schools didn’t have to be a constant fight? Adrian Wood, PhD, shares what actually helped her son with autism thrive in their public school system. Adrian and Amy Julia Becker explore:

• Building trust with educators
• Collaboration and creativity
• Navigating IEPs and transitions
• Small changes that make a big difference

Ask Me Anything: Record (or email) your question for our upcoming Ask Me Anything episode: amyjuliabecker.com/qr/

04:30 Navigating Public School for Children with Disabilities
 06:53 Creative Thinking and Working Together as a Team
 15:55 Strategies for Success 

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• VLOG: Tales of an Educated Debutante

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WATCH this conversation on YouTube: Amy Julia Becker on YouTube

SUBSCRIBE to Amy Julia's Substack: amyjuliabecker.substack.com

JOIN the conversation on Instagram: @amyjuliabecker

LISTEN to more episodes: amyjuliabecker.com/shows/

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ABOUT:

Adrian Wood is the creator of the vlog Tales of an Educated Debutante. She has a PhD in Educational Research and contributes to Today Parents, The Today Show, and the Love What Matters blog. She lives in rural eastern North Carolina with her family. She is the co-author of Autism Out Loud.  

CONNECT with Adrian on her website (talesofaneducateddebutante.com), Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. 

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Take the Next Step is produced in collaboration with Hope Heals. Hope Heals creates sacred spaces of belonging and belovedness for families affected by disabilities to experience sustaining hope in the context of inclusive, intentional, inter-ability communities. Find out more about our resources, gatherings, and inter-ability communities at hopeheals.com. Follow on Instagram @hopeheals.

Connect with me:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Website

Thanks for listening! 

Transcript

Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia Becker (00:05)
to Reimagining the Good Life. If you listened last week, you know I mentioned that we are taking a break here in order to focus on my other podcast, Take the Next Step. So today we want to give you the chance to listen to Take the Next Step. And I hope you will continue to follow along in the weeks to come over there at Take the Next Step. I will be back, I hope, with more Reimagining the Good Life, but that is at a date TBD. So you can keep following this feed and it will pop up eventually.

And again, I will remind you to subscribe to my newsletter, my Substack newsletter, so that we can stay in touch.

I'm Amy Julia Becker and this is Take the Next Step, a podcast for families experiencing disability. We've teamed up with our friends at Hope Heals to bring you weekly conversations with fellow parents, therapists, and disability advocates about practical ways to cultivate a thriving future for the whole family. Here at Take the Next Step, we see your family as a gift to your local community and to our whole society. Your family matters, your child matters,

We need you among us. For those of you who have kids receiving special education services, what is going well? What's hard? How can you get involved in your child's education? There are so many topics to touch on when it comes to special education and we won't cover them all today. IEPs, transition services, what to do if you think your child isn't receiving the services they do, how to foster friendship within school settings, the list goes on and on.

I'm not trying to answer all of our questions today, but I do hope that this conversation with Adrienne Wood will help us all consider meaningful and manageable ways to be engaged in our children's education and take steps toward a good future. Adrienne Wood is the creator of the vlog, Tales of an Educated Debutant. She has a PhD in educational research. She contributes to Today Parents, the Today Show, and Love What Matters blog.

and she lives in rural Eastern North Carolina with her family, including her son Amos, who has autism.

Well, hello, Adrian. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Well, I think you know that I love reading about your family and following you and their ⁓ escapades on social media. But I do want to make sure that we introduce you to our listeners well. So was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about you and your family.

Adrian Wood (02:28)
I'm so glad to be here.

Yeah, I'm Adrienne Wood. have a vlog, I guess is the word for it, Tales of an Educated Debutant and live in a little town that you are very familiar with, your hometown, Eaton to North Carolina. Pretty rural. ⁓ Have four children. My youngest has autism and a genetic disorder. And just sort of I write and do videos about, you know, the backstory of life, escapades, hard stuff.

funny things, just like.

Amy Julia Becker (03:18)
Yeah, and one of the things that I love about what you share is, first of all, it's not all centered around Amos, who is your youngest son who has autism, but also that it is very real. And we get a portrait of the hard and the amazingly good and everything in between. And one of the things that I am hoping to do with this podcast this year is tell stories about when something related to disability is actually going well and is working.

We hear so many stories about how our systems are broken and I do not want to downplay the very real ways that that is true. But I also think that when we can hone in on something that is going well, we can begin to actually envision a good future for our kids, for our families, for our communities and take small steps in that direction. And so having read your, ⁓ well, your social media posts, watched your vlog, you know, for many years now.

I wanted to talk to you about your experience in the public school system and what has actually worked for you and your family. So can we just start with like a little kind of Amos 101 in the public schools, you know, a little bit of the history and like his situation in your local schools.

Adrian Wood (04:33)
Yes, so Edenton has, ⁓ it's one district, we have an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. So there's no Fed4, my friend in Minnesota, there's no this, there's, we have no options. And the benefit of no options is what you have has to work, right? Because I am not a homeschooler, this is not happening for me. I can teach people nothing. And I have a PhD in education, and clearly.

there was a failure somewhere in the coursework. ⁓ So Amos started school, like many children do with a disability, on his third birthday. this is his, the math doesn't ever make sense in my mind, but this is his 10th year in public school and he's 12. And he currently is in the fifth grade. So he's at his last year of elementary school. He spends his day primarily in the typical classroom. ⁓

For a couple years, he was in sort of an exceptional children's classroom. That was kind of during COVID. In pre-K, he was in a typical classroom when he was like five and six. So he's kind of gone back and forth. But since I would say the third grade, he primarily has been in the typical classroom. But there's an exceptional children's classroom where he could kind of go. ⁓ He does some pull out in there and he does still eat lunch in there because the cafeteria is not.

great place for him. He's highly averse to loud noises. ⁓ So that's sort of where we are today.

Amy Julia Becker (06:06)
So what would you say has like what are some of the components of like what's working for him? Like what you know, it sounds like this is a kind of you're speaking in a fairly like straightforward. Yeah, like he's in this classroom. He's in that classroom. What has worked? What has not worked for your family for Amos, particularly? I'm honing in in my mind on the example of he's not going to eat in the cafeteria. Like how do you know? How did you figure that out?

⁓ What went into this being something that you can kind of speak so matter-of-factly about?

Adrian Wood (06:40)
Yeah, a lot. I think a lot of times I'll hear from families and they have not great relationships with their school systems. And it makes me sad because ⁓ we've got to have a good relationship. And so then the question is, well, how do you have a good relationship? And I would say, I think the biggest thing that's helped me is being vulnerable with the school system and really sharing my heart. I have to be willing to share

my wishes for him, you know. It doesn't feel great to be kind of an emotional mess, right? But I remember when he went to pre-K that very first day, I was looking through the rectangular window at him. He was three years old. He was in a one-piece jumper, know, John John, his little Southern boys wear, in a diaper. He was three and ⁓ the principal was standing beside me and I was crying.

I said, just, this is just so hard. And she said, it's hard for everybody when they drop their children off at school. And I said, it's not the same. You know, I've done this three times. I'm not new to this. It's not normal to drop your three-year-old off in a diaper at public school. And I had, in that moment, I had to relinquish vulnerability to her. And she said,

you're right. And so that was kind of, think, the first step, that very first day. And I've got to be willing to really share hard things with them so they know how I do feel.

Amy Julia Becker (08:23)
How has that played out over time? mean, that is so interesting that that was like the very first day without any, it sounds like without forethought, wasn't really, you were like, I never even, principal knows, you know, it just like happened. But it sounds like that also set a path for you.

Adrian Wood (08:38)
Yeah, and so I think I continue to do that. I will say in an IEP meeting, I want the best for Amos and the best for Amos is a world that loves him when I'm not in it anymore. And so he needs access to these typical peers, not just for his academics, but because these are the people that are gonna be around him.

When I'm not always going to be here. He's younger than I am. So the best thing I can do is make the world a friendly place. And if children don't have access to peers with disabilities, then how can they ever truly include them? You know, I think it's cute and fun to show up for Special Olympics, but that's one day. You know, we need bigger than that. And so we are at a school now where everybody knows Amos and

Amy Julia Becker (09:24)
Right.

Adrian Wood (09:35)
I love that because I don't deal with bullying. I don't deal with all these things because they all know Amos. But to go back to the beginning of when he was in the second grade and we were talking about, I said, I was kind of sharing my thoughts and wishes for him. And it was like, well, we're gonna have him eat in the cafeteria and do PE and specials. And I think overwhelmingly, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like most families say that's where inclusion happens.

And for us, I said, well, he doesn't like music and he detests the cafeteria. So those aren't, that's not going to be good for us. but he does like STEM because he enjoys an iPad. So can we, and in the morning, like the morning meeting, they come into the classroom. Can we just try? Can we have him come in for the 30 minutes? We don't have to put it in the IP. Let's just see if it works. And so I sort of approached it like that.

Hmm. I'm willing to say if you say it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But can we try? Well, it's hard to say no, we can't try Hmm. And so we started trying and I said just this year, you know The cafeteria doesn't ever need to be a goal for us. It's okay if we just say I'm never gonna eat in a crowded place Yeah, right like that's okay. So I wanted to eat with his peers. So last year

Amy Julia Becker (10:42)
Yeah.

Adrian Wood (11:03)
I said, okay, if he eats in Ms. Bonner's classroom, could we maybe invite some kids in there? Could they sign up to eat lunch with him? So that's what they do now. Two children sign up every day to eat lunch with him. And this year they expanded it to the whole fifth grade because everybody wants a turn. ⁓ so you're kind of making it like it's a treat to eat with Amos. Yeah. And again, we're just trying, you know, we don't know. We're just trying.

Amy Julia Becker (11:31)
But it also sounds like you are approaching the school as a part of a team of support and care. And I know that for me, I don't know, I felt like I had my guard up as the mom of a child with a disability because I'd heard about lawsuits over IEPs and the ways in which schools have to protect their funding and, ⁓ you know, having the experience of sitting and receiving measures.

of your child from a standardized test that don't seem to really represent them, but also seem to say they're, you know, quote unquote failing in some way, just all those experiences that can feel like I am on the opposite side rather than we are together here for this child. Do you think there are things that you or the school has done to really make it feel like we are working together as a team?

Adrian Wood (12:24)
do say I try to give twice as much as I ask for. I need them to see me in a way that I'm out at school, whether I'm raising money or I'm reading to children or I'm taking the service dog out to the playground so that they see me as a partner and not just this parent that shows up because I do ask for things and I'm not, you know, Miss Sunset and Rainbows all the time. If I feel strongly about something, I sort of

say it in a way that they're not going to call my bluff. It's not argumentative. It's just, this is really important to me.

Amy Julia Becker (13:03)
And it also sounds like you're choosing that even though you might, I don't know, read a book that tells you these are the 10 things that must be happening in the classroom, that you're taking that list, that hypothetical list and saying, well, actually, it doesn't even work for Amos to be in the cafeteria. So we're going to cross that off the list. and we're going to. But we're also going to make sure he's not isolated in a room eating lunch alone. And we're going to find a middle way. And I think that.

almost like creative thinking, which often involves trying things, talking with another, this group of people on the school side, trying to understand where they're coming from, working as a team. Like there's a mindset, it sounds like, that you and they have towards Amos's inclusion and belonging in the school that is part of what's making it work.

Adrian Wood (13:54)
Yeah, I think so. And I think having the right teacher, I say every year and have said now for years, because we, who is the right teacher gonna be? You know, there's this thought that this type of personality is the right teacher. And every year I say, I want a teacher that wants Amos in their classroom. I am not gonna be offended if you don't wanna spend the day with Amos. My parents could not handle Amos for the day. This is not offensive to me.

Amy Julia Becker (14:14)
Hmm.

Adrian Wood (14:24)
recognize your strengths. And so I feel really strongly about that. And we've had years that weren't so great and that ⁓ we've had some really good years the last couple of years. And they're not always the teacher that you would think would love the Amos. So I think going in the classroom this year, I went into the classroom before school started. I asked for a transition meeting because last year

That meeting happened like the week of school and I didn't think the classroom was a good fit, but it felt too late. So this year I was like, I want to do it in July because I need to make sure that this feels right. And the teacher this year, when I went in July, she had a cozy corner set up. She had framed a picture of Amos and his dog in the cozy corner. His teacher last year, one of the teachers he really liked, it was her best friend.

I felt comfortable that they were really gonna have, ⁓ she would be able to communicate with the last teacher. And that was really helpful. So every year learning, ooh, I didn't like that, that didn't, and saying to the school, that didn't work. So we have to pivot and not blaming them, saying to them, I don't know either, but we're gonna try.

Amy Julia Becker (15:41)
Yeah, yeah, I think there's so many things in what you've said that we can kind of extract. One of the things that I know we've talked about is having a small school district can seem really limiting and it also can be filled with great possibilities, because, as you said, there aren't other options. Like we have to make it work. So I'm curious for people, which is I assume the majority of. Don't worry. This is not the end of the episode. There's plenty more.

To hear the rest of this conversation, head over to Take the Next Step podcast with Amy Julia Becker here on this app. While you're there, be sure to follow the show so that you never miss another episode.