Top 10 School Concerns for Students on the Autism Spectrum
Thousands of kids face life with Asperger’s (AS) and High-Functioning Autism (HFA). These young people have (a) rigid behaviors that are often exhibited as an insistence on a specific order of events, a compulsion to complete what was started, an insistence on rules, a difficulty with transitions, or a fear that is based on a single experience; (b) obsessive interests that may be similar to the interests of other kids, but they are unlike other kids because their restricted interest is the only activity in which they participate; (c) difficulty predicting the future, insisting that things happen in a certain order; (d) an inability to recognize that there are times when rules can be renegotiated, bent, or broken; and (e) a restricted range of interests that can take unusual or eccentric forms (e.g., some may be interested in unusual things, such as washing machines, bus timetables, or subway maps). In addition, many kids with AS and HFA have additional psychiatric diagnoses (e