Wanda, Brook and Stacy
Content Warning: These stories are about violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and may include references to suicide or self-harming behaviours. They may contain graphic descriptions and strong language and may be distressing. Some narratives may be about First Nations people who have passed away. If you need support, please see Contact & support.
‘It takes one individual to set a student up for success … but it also takes one person in a position of leadership or one bad teacher to ruin those educational opportunities.’
Stacy and her three children are autistic.
‘My son started primary school knowing he was autistic. [Brook] was diagnosed at 10 and [Wanda] was diagnosed at eight.’
Stacy’s daughter Brook, who’s now at university, supported her mother at the Royal Commission.
‘We have a really wide range of experiences with the education system,’ said Brook. ‘It’s particularly important to us to acknowledge that there’s a lot of trauma that comes into this, not only as a student that went through these experiences, but also from the parent’s perspective as well.’
Stacy described her children’s primary school experiences as ‘constant challenge after discrimination after challenge after bad experience’.
For example, in Brook’s final year at primary school, the students voted her into a leadership position. The teacher, however, wouldn’t allow it.
‘[Brook] was [also] supposed to be getting the academic achievement award of the year and she had it taken off her,’ Stacy said.
When Brook started high school, Stacy found only one private school ‘that would offer her support because of her autism’.
Initially the school was very supportive.
‘It was really positive,’ said Brook. ‘But then the vice principal retired.’
Brook said the retiring vice principal was ‘really interested in … putting the students first’. The new vice principal was ‘far more concerned with policy’.
‘The policy’s very strict … You can only conform within the specific written legislation. And so all of those accessibility features and modifications we’d come to experience and appreciate were going.’
Brook and her brother graduated not long after these changes, but Wanda still attends.
Brook says there are times when the school makes Wanda sit outside her classroom ‘almost feeling like she’s being punished’. The school won’t let her therapists attend unless they walk ‘a hundred metres behind’.
‘And [Wanda] wasn’t allowed to talk to her [therapist] if there were teachers around … Even now, for the therapist to go into the school she’s not allowed to go to the toilet!’
Brook said inflexible school policies make it too hard to appropriately support Wanda. She has ‘gone backwards’ and is ‘losing her voice in the academic field’.
‘We don’t know if she will actually finish out her high school years there because it’s getting so difficult … It’s been a really sad journey, honestly.’
‘I think we’ve forgotten the goals and the individualised participation verses policies and procedures,’ said Stacy.
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.