Eye Contact Arkansas is seeking your stories and viewpoints from around the state of Arkansas.  Please contact the site author, Marjorie Greenberg, if you'd like to write an article or to be interviewed for an essay on your personal autism story. Contributors interested in publicising their Arkansas autism group, helping other families navigate IEPs and DHS, or otherwise helping the community are also welcome.

If your child attends a private school for special education, why bother with the public school system? You the parent have obviously voted against it by going elsewhere.

Child find is still important to you. Your child can still get some therapy services from the school district. The local school district allocates money to the non-public school special ed children depending on their percentage in the district. So if it looks like there are no homeschooled or private school special ed children, then there’s no money allocated for their therapies.

The cutoff date used by Arkansas for this allocation is December 1^st . If you’ve never gone through Child Find before, read this article. You’ll have to start 60 days in advance of December 1st, or by mid-September. Now is a good time to start!

Child find does not require you to attend a local public school, but your son or daughter will be a called an "enrolled" student.

Dealing with autism has been a lot like peeling an onion: you take off one layer of skin, only to discover there’s a new problem lying underneath. It can also make you a bit weepy because it’s very frustrating in that there’s no end, just new if more minor difficulties. Years ago our son wouldn’t speak or respond to commands—with a small ABA program he started to do so. Then he ran away from other children—social skills practice and a calm school environment helped him play with other children. Last year we found that his language skills had caught up but that he had a lot of anxiety in class or performance situations. With gradual exposure to stressful situations and medication the anxiety decreased. Now under the anxiety he seems to have great difficulty remembering sequential instructions.

I’m very proud of our family’s hard work to help him, but it’s not been easy.