<p>I am wondering if anyone has had experience with leaving high school early to go to college. my son is a junior in high school and i am considering have him take the Calif. high school profiency exam (CHSPE) to start junior college next year. he was planning on doing this route anyway because of his autism. He is a bright young man and in a private high school now doing very well academically. He suffers from anxiety because of the social issues in high school. Any feedback would be appreciated.</p>
<p>jjmom04 -</p>
<p>Have you asked this in the Parents’ Forum? There are several threads there about Early College. Also, you could look for anything by owlice (or maybe it is Owlice). Her son sounds like yours, and he left HS early to go to Simon’s Rock.</p>
<p>In my observation, the social issues in community colleges are not as crazy-making as those of a HS. Starting the junior college now rather than later may be a very good solution for your son.</p>
<p>Wishing you all the best.</p>
<p>jjmom04, I am glad that you let your kid have the option to finish High School early. Because I struggled with HFA issues the most in High School and it was a near-hell experience for me, meaning that my High School experience was like being tossed into a swimming pool without knowing how to swim. When I started High School, my grades started to slip a little bit (note in 8th grade and on, my grades started to fall down the toilet and it truly went down the drain). I was not motivated to try and I said, you know what, screw it, to myself. As the years went by, I slipped into deeper and deeper depression, ending up nearly getting arrested twice. I also developed suicidal thoughts and thoughts of quitting school.</p>
<p>I told my parents that I want to go a seperate school for kids with similar issues as mine or get homeschooling. But my parents were getting all paranoid about the idea of homeschooling, saying that they were afraid that I will be lazy and sit on the computer all day. Also, they thought that if they sent me to a special school for kids with similar issues as mine, they would have thought I wouldn’t have as challenging of an educational experience as I would have in a mainstreamed environment.</p>
<p>You are doing the right thing for your child to take him out of a mainstreamed environment and make sure he goes to a community college, so he won’t have to deal with too much social demands. I really praise you for taking a brave action to save your child from dealing with the living hells of high schools. That way, in the meantime, you can help your child develop better social skills so he can get prepared with the real world. Unforunately, with people with HFA, going out to the real world can be one heck of a risk, but with self awareness on how the person with HFA learns and knowing what they do right and wrong, they can get the results they want.</p>
<p>Unforunately, my parents were being too stubborn and not listening to my suggestions by keeping me put in a mainstream school where I had to endure more and more endless bullying and tormenting (unforunately I had no self awareness that some of the stuff that I was doing was wrong, another classic HFA symptom), then I slipped into depression and pled to my parents to either homeschool me or send me to a private school for kids with issues like me. As my parents were stubborn, ignorant and thinking that I will endure more of mainstream schooling and ignorantly thinking that I will learn this skills own my own, my depression got so worse that I almost nearly got in trouble with the law twice, as well as contemplating suicide in Junior Year (no lie about the suicide part), as well as thoughts of dropping out from High School, plus fist fights with family members (no joke about that part).</p>
<p>But I guess ever since I got into community college, I am well liked by my peers now, I can get along with my friends well, I know how to keep and maintain peer relationships, I can drive fluently 100%, I can go travelling all over the place, I know how to manage my time, I am more self aware of my wrong doings and right doings, I am aiming to get near-perfect or perfect grades for my 4-year college transferrable GPA after bombing 3 semesters at community college (I hope can accomplish this goal), putting my mind into schoolwork for the 1st time in my life (I did this in the spring semester, getting about 3.0, though I made tons of mistakes, and actually learned from my mistakes for the 1st time in my life), plus many more forms of progress. (Note: I literally hated school in HS and I did literally so awful academically speaking, you will not even believe it.) Go send your kid to a community college, It will help him develop and grow as a person, then he will be able to live happily and independently.</p>
<p>Well, good luck with whatever your child wants to achieve. Don’t let hypocritical counselors at the disabled students office tell him that he will flip burgers for the rest of his life. Help him excel and tell him that he can live just like his neuro-typical peers, school counselors are just simply messing with the minds of kids and parents.</p>
<p>My Two Cents,
KMan3000</p>
<p>I think this is a great idea. I have Asperger Syndrome and my grades slipped senior year because I was “done” with high school, wasn’t into to the social experience of senior year (my school really enforced socialization on me.) I was bullied into insanity my first two years of high school, but the bullies didn’t get punished. Instead I was sent to useless pragmatic therapy sessions that were reduced to the lowest common denominator. I needed new scenery and a more serious atmosphere and would have preferred to spend my senior year at community college and receive a dual enrollment diploma but the school wouldn’t do that.</p>