We had a meeting with the ABA therapy people yesterday about my stepdaughter's progress. She is doing online public school instead of traditional in-person learning (cuz covid and also cuz she doesn't do well in the traditional setting). So we send her laptop with her for her to work on school lessons during their independent work time and so someone can help her if needed. They told us outright that they want us to withdraw her from school completely so she can do ABA full time now through the summer and then go to traditional school next school year. She'd have to redo 5th grade but they say they'll send a person with her to school to keep her on task.

My wife and I neither think this is a good solution. There's only a couple months left in the school year and she's not that far behind in her lessons (a couple in eash class, so about a week tops and they can work at their own pace to some extent). And we also feel she will see this as a victory. She doesn't want to do school. Period. She has told us outright "I don't want to do my school work" and "I don't care about my school". She did the same at school too, throwing tantrums until one teacher would have to out her in the hall for disrupting the class. She latched on to that and when she doesn't want to do something, that's exactly what she does, just tantrums until we give up on whatever it is she doesn't want to do. We're afraid pulling her from school, which when she was asked about it she got really excited about not having to do school anymore.

The resistance to doing things she doesn't want to do is the behavior we told them about when they asked us for any concerns we had at the start. They told us a week or so in that they hadn't seen any of that. Now suddenly they're saying they don't want to help her with school anymore and don't want her doing it at all. It sounds to me like it is happening there now and they aren't equipped for handling whatever that is cuz it goes outside the box of what they are doing.

Thoughts?
#Autism #ABAtherapy #School #OppositionalDefiantDisorder #PathologicalDemandAvoidanceSyndrome #ADHD