So, I have always thought this was a change in how we choose to support students, how we allocate resources. But, for some people? No. What they see is a rising epidemic.

This is not good. It's not good because it's not real.

Because while it is true that when I started teaching I didn't have a single student diagnosed with autism it's also true that I had students who probably would be today. And this could have helped them I think. Mostly socially.

2/

Many schools will have a "resource room" this is staffed by people with education in things like autism but also learning disabilities, and really anything that might making going to school harder.

If you want help from the resource room you need a diagnosis. This means families go and get them. That help could mean meeting with someone once a week who helps with planning and organization.

That help could mean the resource room gives me advice about my teaching. 3/

Here is a concrete example. The resource room lets me know I have a student who is sensitive to distracting noise and asks if my room is quiet during tests. I notice it's not. There is traffic noise from the window. I bug the school till they give me a heavy curtain. Now it's more quiet during the tests.

For ALL of the students.

But, the power to make the purchase and change happens faster because of the resource room.

So, naturally I think this great.

4/

I'm not as thrilled when I hear parents talking about "something wrong with kids increasingly"

And then they look at the number of students using the resource room and freak out about it.

But that can also happen.

5/5

I want to add that I think it could be very easy if you are a parent with a child who is struggling and your school has no resource room, to feel like this is a new crisis.

I sometimes wonder about the obvious mismatch between which students have a formal diagnosis and which students are having real difficulties where simple changes could make a big difference.

I have bought curtains myself when I thought it would help I don't really care about labels.

But also I'm not an expert on everything that can interfere with learning. The resource room advice is often very easy to implement and effective.

It's almost always something that helps not just one student but many.

With budget cuts resources rooms are always the first to go after art and sports.

Let's think about THAT a little.

Let's think about that noisy classroom without the resource room. To even find out there is a problem the student would need to come to me and bring it up, this is scary. "I could have done better but it was just so noisy" I would take that seriously, but many might just think it was an excuse for not studying.

But let's say you *do* take it seriously. You ask the school to fix it. They hem and haw, and maybe in a year they do. Terrible.

I've been teaching for a long time and I'm pretty good at it, not to brag or anything. Over my career I have watched autism and learning disabilities (which aren't the same thing) become more discussed, in some cases better addressed and in other cases become more of a source of alarm among my colleges, parents, and education press.

What I have not seen in nearly two decades is any change at all in "how the children are"

1/

@futurebird
'What I have not seen in nearly two decades is any change at all in "how the children are"''

Is this concerning autism/learning disability specifically, or more general?

Decades of experience with writing about the crisis of today's youth have made me automatically skeptical of "something is horribly wrong with the children!" articles, but it sure seems like I've seen a lot of them in the past several years, especially concerning the consequences of the COVID pandemic and all the responses to it. Sometimes, they're wildly dissonant with my experience of my college-age daughter, who lived through it all, but of course all that can be (and is) dismissed as anecdotal.

@mattmcirvin

I do think there is a little something about lockdown. Students in middle school during those years seem most impacted. They are just a bit behind on some math skills and for the years right after I had to break some of horrendous cheating habits.

That is passing through.

But this was about LDs and Autism and ADHD ... all this stuff was around before but it was "very quiet" and "trouble maker" and "not good at school"

which kind of sucks, right?