Behavior Assistant

In 2003 I spent a year working one on one as a Behavior Assistant for a non-verbal autistic teenager with a history of eloping. I was hired by On Our Own through a contract with SCOE (Sonoma County Office of Education) to work at Elsie Allen High School. In many ways it was a fantastic job. I have twenty years experience in the computer industry and three years experience working with the developmentally disabled. Although I made vastly more money in the computer industry, the fact is that my work did little or nothing to benefit mankind. On the other have I made little money working with the developmentally disabled, but I did feel like I was doing something positive for humanity. No doubt I did far more good in my three years as an aid than my twenty years as a software developer.

At the time of my employment I had a growing suspicion that I had Asperger’s and a few years later I was formally diagnosed with Asperger’s. So I have a strong vested interest in understanding autism. At the time people were reporting breakthroughs in assisting non-verbal autistic people to communicate with others and a great deal of this information was on the Internet. I developed a program of intervention to assist the non-verbal teenager I worked with to become verbal. When I began working with the teenager he might respond with a single “no” every week or so and that was the extent of his verbal interaction. After a year he was almost able to sing Row Row Row Your Boat all the way through by himself, he was responding to questions with almost complete sentences and he had even begun to spontaneously make requests for things like pizza.

Unfortunately there was a dark side to my job. I had been led to understand that the teens previous aid had left the area and was very surprised to discover that she was still in town. I was very surprised that there was no arrangement for transfer of knowledge considering the seriousness of the teen’s problems with eloping and the fact that the previous aid had worked with the teen for a number of years. I came to believe that there was no initial transfer of knowledge because the true requirements and expectations for the job were insane and no one would have ever taken the job if they had understood that. Despite my radical success with the teen, after I quit there was also no interest in me providing any continuity of training or knowledge. The teen had a personal aid only because the parents had threaten the school system with a lawsuit.

When I began devising a program of intervention to help the teen become verbal the staff at On Our Own was puzzled. They explained that the teen was in his final year of school and that the goal was to simply keep him from running away. The idea of teaching the teen anything was fundamentally foreign to them. Despite the extreme danger of the teen successfully evading staff and escaping, which he had done a number of times before, he wasn’t on any behavior program. When I raised the issue of the importance of a behavior program, a staff psychologist was assigned to create a behavior program. Typically the implementation of a behavior program based exclusively on positive reinforcement is deemed so benign that there are few formal restrictions on doing so. So I already had an informal behavior program in place based on positive reinforcement. The psychologist reviewed the program I had put together and decided to simply make it the official behavior program. There was only one new item added. In the formal behavior program the new item was the only item written in bold print. I was to always be in arms length from the teen so that if he ever tried to run off I could merely reach out and stop him without even moving. I spoke to a number of people about the absolute impracticality of always being in arms length from the teen. Everyone agreed that practically speaking this was simply not possible to implement. Regardless of that fact, the requirement remained in bold print.

Over and over again the same pattern emerged. The requirements of my job were completely inconsistent with teaching the teen anything in terms of academics, communication skills or positive changes in behavior.  What the requirements of my job were consistent with was that I was solely there as a legal shield to protect SCOE and On Our Own from legal action when the teen successfully ran away again.

Part of the required training for behavior assistants was to take a class in managing violent behaviors. I explained that that I already had considerable expertise in safely restraining violent people, but was told that under no circumstance was I ever to use those techniques. Although our training book documented a number of restraint techniques, we were taught only one technique and prohibited from using any other techniques. The one technique we were taught was a complicated that required multiple people and took prior practice in order to implement. Of course I was the only person with training in that technique out on the work site and so regardless of the situation, I never was able to restrain someone with violent behavior. So the training was merely a cleaver way of prohibiting to staff from ever using a restraining technique despite the fact that we were required to be trained in restraining techniques. Because the use of these restraining techniques can occasionally led to a lawsuit, the intent appeared to be to minimize any possible lawsuit. The fundamental technique we were taught to apply was to simply escape and run away from any violent behavior. I explained to the trainer in class that since I weighed almost two hundred pounds and was very fit I had virtually no concern regarding my own personal safety, what I was seriously concerned about was how to intervene if a coworker or a student was attacked. Because I am autistic I possess virtually no empathy, I can not sense or feel other peoples emotions. In a rare exception I could feel the trainer's anger and almost hatred of me as she stared at me for a number of seconds in silence. On Our Own repeatedly maintained that our training in managing violent behaviors was purely done for formal reasons because SCOE prohibited violent students from attending school. I explained a number of times that this simply was not true and that I regularly witnessed acts of considerable violence in the class I worked in. On Our Own simply reiterated their statement that the school system was configured in such a fashion as to make violence in the classroom an impossibility despite the incidences that I notified them that I had repeatedly observed.

Over and over again I saw the principle of confidentiality perverted to protect the school system instead of the children. Did you know that if a child beat up your child that you had no right to know who the perpetrator was? You were just notified that your child was in an incident where they were hurt by another student. Did you know that if a child beat up your child over and over again on a regular basis that you still had no right to know who the perpetrator was? Seriously, who the hell is being protected here, the children or the school system? One of the difficulties the teen I worked with had was that he was he was only maybe one hundred and twenty pounds and he was regularly bullied and attacked by a two hundred and thirty pound student. Because I was always so close to the teen I worked with I was able to protect him by my mere presence as the violent teen always went for helpless unprotected victims when no one was watching. The same teen made numerous attacks on a small blind student that only weighed eighty pounds. When now one was looking he would make a running charge at the blind teen shoving the teen with great force that would send him flying through the air. Did the school system expel the violent student to stop incidences of violence as On Our own claimed? No. The school system is required to provide services to all developmentally disabled children until their twenty second birthday. They couldn'tget rid of the violent teen. I am not emotionally configured in a manner that allows me to stand by and allow people to be harmed and victimized, so I had no choice but to intervene. Because I was not allowed to use any practical restraint techniques I was unable to restrain the violent teen, so I ended up repeatedly using my body as a body shield to protect the student. All I could do was stand in the way and take the blow instead of the students. Fortunately I am large enough that my mere presence stopped the violent teen from hurting anyone else because he was mostly interested in helpless targets that had no possible way to retaliate.

During my tenure I bought and maintained a notebook where I documented my work with the teen I was assigned to. I showed the book to everyone, and everyone knew that I was keeping records. Because I bought the book and maintained it and worked at two different sites everyday with the teen in my charge I kept the book in my personal possession. Everyone at SCOE and On Our Own knew this. Because of the unusual degree of success that I had with the teen I was working with and the support I provided the other students, when I quit the teacher asked me if I would be willing to continue on in the capacity of a volunteer. Because of my intense commitment I agreed. When a permanent replacement was found I showed up, provided the new behavior assistant with an overview of the teen and my work over the last year and I handed the book of documentation over to my replacement. What happened next was appalling. While everyone knew that I had personally maintained the book of documentation on my own recognizance, SCOE called the teacher and stated that someone had claimed that I had removed documentation maintained by the school from the premises. The teacher was told that I was no longer allowed on the school grounds and they called the police on me and I had a police officer begin to follow me off the campus. The officer was obviously there to intercept me, but was a ways off from me and did not communicate with me in any manner to stop and wait for him. The officer merely followed me at a distance and let me leave to campus. The teacher called me later and was incredibly upset at what had happened and stated that she had explained to SCOE that I had done nothing wrong at all and was actually on the campus at her request. SCOE simply repeated their position that I was not to allowed on campus again and I never returned.

So what happened? I saw a repeated pattern of SCOE and On Our Own controlling staff and keeping them in line using fear. But the pattern is much more pervasive than just the school system. Take a person who wants to dedicate their life to helping others and provide them with a job. But there is a catch! When hired you are told that you are legally required to provide a level of services, let’s call it 100. So you begin working and after a while you realize that you only have been supplied the resources to get to 25. What to do? Do you quit your vocation? No. Do you abandon the people you serve so that you might be replaced by someone less able? No. What you do is you make due, you make up the difference out of your own resources and life force. Can you ever speak up and dissent about anything, can you ever confront the system with the fact that it is literally impossible to do the job at a level of excellence that you are legally required to do? No. You just suck it up and make do. You are now completely controlled by fear. If you step out of line your employer can always easily show that you are in dereliction of your legal duties. Why? Because everyone in the system is technically always in dereliction of their duties in some manner because they simplely never had the resources to comply rigorously with their duties. You are not really doing a job, you are just a facade that allows to system to maintain that it is providing the level of services that it is legally obliged to provide. You are nothing but a legal circuit breaker protecting those above you in case anything goes wrong.

The system is rigged at ever level. Numerous parents of autistic children have told me about the struggle they had to undergo just to diagnose their children with autism and then there is the struggle after that to acquire the necessary level of services to provide their children with the help that they need and deserve. It’s just a money game that the government plays, but they are able to get mental health professionals to dance to their tune and assist in the filtering process. So how many people are really autistic? For the government the answer is the number of people who are autistic is bounded by the amount of money that the government has to support services for autistic people. If the government ran out of money to provide services to autistic people autism would simply disappear as a legitimate diagnosis and no one would be considered autistic. A couple of years before I was diagnosed with Asperger’s I had a counselor tell me that I would never be diagnosed with Asperger’s because adults were never diagnosed with Asperger’s and that there are just no services available to adults with Asperger’s. So how did I get a diagnosis of Asperger’s? My family happened to know of a psychologist who worked extensively with autistic people and who evidently didn’t know that diagnosing adults with Asperger’s was politically incorrect. The DSM has very clear guidelines as to what constitutes Asperger’s. The psychologist that diagnosed me did a rigorous set of interverviews with my family and people that had known me as a child. Each necessary criteria for Asperger’s is documented in considerable detail based on information from my entire life. This doesn’t change the fact that I have had a number of mental health professionals determine immediately upon meeting me that I don’t have Asperger’s and they have no issue with expressing their ire that I claim to have Asperger’s, even when I tell them I have a formal diagnosis. So is is common procedure in the mental health field to declare that someone doesn’t have Asperger’s simply because they don’t look like they have Asperger’s!

Does all of this make me angry? It does, it makes me enraged, enraged at myself. What did I do with my knowledge and understanding of the systematic defects of the system? Nothing! I had just lost my profession as a software developer, I had just been truly homeless for the first time in my life, reduced to living in the woods. I was terrified that if I spoke up the resultant backlash from the system would make me completely unemployable. I knew something systemic and horribly wrong was occurring and yet I did nothing. All that it needed to take to blow the corruption of the entire system wide open was for a single well educated and intelligent person with strong moral conviction to work in the system for a while in a menial position and they would be in a position to bring the entire system down. That is why it was imperative for SCOE to immediately get rid of me the moment I was no longer employed. While I was employed it was a trivial affair to bring me down for not rigorously performing my duties to the full extent of my legal obligation. This is because this can be done to anyone due to the nature of the system. The moment I had no legal obligation SCOE had no method to control me with fear. This put the entire system in peril and necessitated that SCOE not merely ask me to leave, but to call the police on me for just being on the campus.

After almost ten years I am no longer able to extensively document the failing of the system as I could of. So where is my proof? Just show what I have written to parents of a developmentally disabled child, to teachers and behavior assistants. I think you will find that many of them will confirm that my claims are not unreasonable and that some will even verify that the system works exactly as I have described it. It is a house of cards and it is a titanic failure of society that no one has bothered to exert the light pressure needed to topple the entire system. Many of our social services are merely facades, the shell of a service that appears to meet the mandates of society if not seen up close.