Autism Meets Coronavirus: Distance Learning Edition

"I'm sick of cancelled."– Leah, last Saturday morning

Good, I thought, maybe she's experiencing a touch of cabin fever, even missing her village at school. If I'm really lucky, she'll be ready for some reconnections when they roll out distance learning.

I'm not worried about Leah losing academic ground during the school closure. Once she learns a skill, she keeps it. I am worried about her school's ability to reopen with staff intact, whenever this ends. That means cooperating as best we can with related services delivered virtually and with some distance learning assignments. Leah's school is filled with students whose attendance is funded by school districts unable to support them in-house. They need to maintain at least some of their funding during this period of self-quarantine. So we'll give it a go.

Leah cares about none of this.

To be fair, I haven't explained the economics of her school placement to her. In Leah's eyes, I am committing the ultimate party foul when I ask her to perform tasks that normally take place only at St. Elizabeth School. I declined homework for her years ago, for two reasons: One, with her waiver services, we were able to fund 1:1 sessions at home to work on the functional skills she needs. That seemed like a better use of her after-school time. And two, by the time we got her placed at St. Elizabeth, Leah was such a virtuoso at escape/avoidance behaviors that she probably could have trained a legion of BCBAs. It was well within Leah's wheelhouse to resist schoolwork until the end of the day, and call it a victory. We decided the best way for schoolwork to follow her home would be as a consequence for a day of noncompliance.

Luckily, we've never had to use that strategy. Leah's village was not born yesterday. The flip side is that she is well out of the habit of doing schoolwork outside school. Now our entire country is redefining what it means to attend school, and we have to ask Leah to adjust as well, while many of her usual reinforcers aren't available.

I am expecting this to go swimmingly.

I started to hear from Leah's team at the beginning of the month, and we began to set up video sessions, leaving me to walk a very fine line between preparing her for the tasks ahead (dropping someone with autism into a new situation with zero preparation is a rookie mistake) and giving Leah time to plan a resistance strategy. If you've ever watched the movie Hoosiers, we spend chunks of time trying not to feel like the underdogs from Hickory, with Leah appearing as our heavily favored opponent from South Bend Central. We have to make sure we're ahead by the final basket.

The initial strategy is to lightly drop the possibility of chatting with her village via my phone. That four-letter word – w@%k – is not mentioned. She's onto me, though. Mention the name of any adult associated with St. Elizabeth School – and she has a genuine, affectionate bond with many of them – and the answer is a flat no. School does not belong in her house.

I occasionally comment that one or the other of them misses her, and otherwise I leave it mostly alone. (I do ask her sisters to try to do some schoolwork in her presence, in the faint hope that this will normalize it a little.) Another way to gauge Leah's mood – essentially reading between the nos – is to glance at her Google history. If she's searching for any variation of the word 'nope,' you're probably cooked. And this was borne out by her search history shortly after I spoke the word 'school', with two days to go before her first video chat:

When I cleaned out Leah's closet over the winter, I found four t-shirts that had versions of NOPE printed on the chest. Four different people saw these shirts and thought of Leah. With a few adjustments to her daily wardrobe schedule, she could decline work for four out of five school days without even having to speak.

We're up against it.

I experience a sliver of hope when Leah happily chats during a video visit with a medical provider the day before her first St. Elizabeth session. She finds it quite entertaining, repeatedly asking the doctor, "Is that you in there?" and laughing. But of course, I'm doing all the heavy lifting, and periodically pointing the camera at Leah so that the doctor knows she's actually in the room.

I remark on how much Leah seemed to enjoy the video visit and decide to risk suggesting that a check in with her social worker tomorrow might be equally pleasant. This social worker, by the way, is one of the heroes of Leah's village. For Halloween 2018, she and her husband engineered part of Leah's Jack Bowser costume. In 2019, Leah cast her as Little Bo Peep in her Halloween entourage (which also included her homeroom teacher as a poodle named Pinky). Her reward: Leah has stopped using her actual name and now calls her Bo Peep.

Regardless, my gentle suggestion is met with an emphatic "No Bo Peep."

I prepare for online learning by making a menu of reinforcers. Leah can pick one if she complies with her session. Hopefully she'll find one she likes. Bo Peep, champ that she is, digs out the bow from her costume in the hopes that we can jolly Leah into cooperation. (Collaboration, actually. For reasons known only to her, Leah hates the word 'cooperate' and insists on 'collaborate' as a replacement.)

The next morning, as the appointed time approaches, Leah feigns exhaustion. The I Need A Nap strategy is the one I expected, and I deploy the reinforcer chart in response. It keeps her in the land of the living, surfing YouTube, until it's time to meet Bo Peep in her Google meeting. It does not prevent Leah from examining the unfamiliar app on my phone's screen, looking for the hang up icon, nor from deploying her repertoire of goodbyes. We spend a few minutes engaging Leah, and then I retreat to provide an update outside her hearing. Talking about her escape-avoidance tactics within her hearing is best avoided; no point in adding to her ammunition.Leah takes advantage of the break to put herself to bed, where she chats happily to herself until she remembers she's supposed to be exhausted and quiets down. She's a riot when she thinks she's winning. Bo Peep and I formulate a plan to eke out enough collaboration from Leah to allow her to earn her first reinforcer. Success the first time out should give us room to raise the bar later on.

Thanks to mobile technology the session continues in Leah's bedroom. Bo Peep has been working on a quarantine time capsule with many of her students. Leah is given three art activities to choose from, and because she is a worthy opponent, she stirs from her lair to do the minimum, adhering to the letter of the law, if not the spirit. She earns, on a technicality. We survive our first foray into distance learning.

We'll call it a draw.