Being told that your child can no longer attend their daycare or preschool can feel overwhelming. You may worry about your child's future, question whether you did something wrong, or feel unsure about where to turn next. However, being asked to leave a program does not mean your child cannot succeed in another setting. It may simply mean that the current classroom does not have the resources, training, or support needed to meet your child's individual needs. Understanding what happened and exploring the right next steps can help you find an environment where your child feels supported and has the opportunity to thrive.
What the Behavior Was Actually Telling You
Before the incident reports, before
the meetings, your child was trying to communicate something. Young children
who do not yet have the words for what they need will find another way to say
it, and that other way is usually loud, physical, or both.
- A child who bites at pickup time may have no way to say that the room got loud and overwhelming an hour ago.
- A child who bolts for the door may be trying to escape a space that feels unbearable, not trying to run away from you.
- A child who falls apart at cleanup time may be struggling with transitions, one of the hardest parts of the preschool day for a lot of autistic kids.
A child who hits when a peer grabs a
toy may simply not have the language yet to protest. Aggression in young
autistic children
almost always has a reason underneath it, and that reason is usually
communication.
None of this means something is wrong
with your child. It means the amount of support your child needs is larger than what one teacher with fourteen other three-year-olds can provide. That is a
staffing problem. It is not a character problem, and it is not a parenting
problem.
What to Do in the First Two Weeks
The days right after a removal feel
chaotic. A short list helps.
1. Ask for the specifics in writing.
Request the incident reports, the
dates, the time of day each event happened, and what was going on right before.
Directors will usually provide this. That detail is genuinely valuable later,
because a pattern of meltdowns at 11:30 every day tells a clinician something
that "behavioral concerns" never will.
2. Call your pediatrician and ask for
an evaluation.
Do not wait to see if your child
grows out of it. Ask specifically about a developmental screening and a
referral. A formal autism evaluation and
diagnosis opens the
door to services and insurance coverage that are otherwise out of reach, and
the earlier a child starts getting the right kind of support, the more ground
they tend to make up.
3. Look at the pattern, not the worst
day.
Parents tend to replay the single
worst incident on a loop. Zoom out instead. Are the hard moments clustered
around noise, hunger, transitions, or being asked to do something new? Those
clusters are the map.
4. Stop auditioning at programs that
were never built for this.
Plenty of families spend a full year
cycling through their third and fourth daycare, hoping the next one will be
different. Most are not different, because most are staffed the same way. At
some point the more useful question stops being "which daycare will keep
my child" and becomes "what kind of program is actually designed for
a child like mine."
Where a Lot of Our Families Come From
A meaningful share of the children
enrolled at Elevation Autism arrived after exactly this experience. A daycare
or preschool told a family that they could not meet the child's needs, and the
family came looking for something else. So if you are reading this a week after
that phone call, know that you are walking a road many of our parents have
already walked, and that their children are doing well.
Elevation is not a daycare. We are also not a traditional clinic. We
were designed to look and feel like a preschool built for
autistic children,
with a level of individual support that no preschool could realistically staff.
Children come to a classroom. There
are centers, circle time, peers, a schedule on the wall, songs, snack, and
outside play. The difference is that every child in that room has a trained
therapist paired with them throughout the day.
What That Actually Looks Like Day to Day
One-to-one support inside a group
setting. Each child
is assigned a primary therapist, plus a team of four therapists who rotate
across mornings, afternoons, and days of the week. That rotation is deliberate.
It keeps a child from becoming dependent on one adult and helps new skills
carry over to every adult in the room, which is exactly what a kindergarten
teacher will need.
Care led by clinicians who specialize
in this. Programs
are designed and supervised by BCBAs and delivered by Registered Behavior
Technicians.
Therapies in one building instead of
three. Children can
receive ABA and speech therapy through
partner therapists who come into our program. Parents are not driving across
the metro to three different offices on three different afternoons. It also
mirrors how support will be delivered once your child is in elementary school,
where the therapists come to the classroom.
Built for the youngest learners. Our Early Learners program serves children ages one through
kindergarten. Most families start with us around two and a half or three years
old and stay about two years. Kids leave us in late summer, when they head off
to kindergarten.
Insurance accepted. We work with all major insurance
carriers, and our intake team will walk you through your specific coverage
before you commit to anything.
Does This Mean My Child Cannot Handle
School?
No. School readiness is the entire
point.
A day with us is built around the
skills a kindergarten classroom is going to ask for: sitting with a group,
waiting for a turn, asking an adult for help, following a two-step direction,
handling a change in the schedule without the day coming apart. Those are
teachable skills. They are taught in the same kind of environment where your
child will eventually need to use them, with an adult right there to help the
moment it gets hard.
The children who struggled most in a
traditional preschool room are often the ones who make the most visible
progress here, because for the first time the support matches the need.
Come See It for Yourself
Reading about a program only goes so
far. Most parents tell us the difference clicked the moment they walked through
a classroom and watched it happening.
If your child was recently asked to
leave a daycare or preschool, we would be glad to talk with you about what
comes next. Call us at 404-474-0040 or book a tour.
Your child does not need to be fixed.
They need a room that was built for them.
