Related story: Autism

By Jennifer Jordan
Journal Staff Writer

Shortly after I started working here, I noticed special education topics absorbed a lot of time at School Committee meetings in South Kingstown.

In a July meeting, someone mentioned an autism "bubble" of five or six students at one of the elementary schools. At the same time, people from Bradley School in Providence started calling because they were building a new special needs school down here, and at a Planning Board meeting, representatives from South Shore Mental Health Center said they wanted to do the same.

So, I figured something was going on with all of this and I talked to my regional editor, Dave McCarthy, about doing a story -- why all the special needs services down here? Were numbers going up? What was autism really like?

Bradley said I could interview a family who had a son with Asperger's and then the public schools helped me find the second family -- a boy with mild autism. I liked the contrast of two different but related disorders, and two different school options, two different families, etc.

It was hard to find time to do this story though, and even though I met with the families several times in the fall, with photographer Frieda Squires taking pictures, I never seemed to have time to pull it together. Every time I talked to someone, they gave me names of other experts, and in December it became clear that Rhode Island had an explosion -- the Department of Education was very helpful with all this.

By the time deputy executive editor Carol Young saw a draft in January, she said I needed more time with the kids to really get inside the disorder. I had never spent more than an hour or two with the kids at a time and never seen them in class and it showed.

Once I spent that time, the other information made more sense, I was pushed to do more "show, don't tell." It went through several versions, a nightmare I won't bore you with -- sidebars scrapped, etc. but throwing out a lot of stuff was good in the end.

The kids and their parents were really, really great -- letting us spend so much time, being so honest about the hard parts.

Both families said a lot of uplifting, positive stuff that we cut in the end. I wonder if I should have left a bit more in because at least two families with autistic children wrote to me and felt it was too harsh. But the families in the story said they were OK with the way it turned out.

It was frustrating to work on a story in bits and pieces, fits and starts for almost six months, not always being sure what precisely the story was, etc. But it turned out to be a very valuable experience for me. And I loved massaging the story, doing several drafts, because that's a luxury we deadline reporters rarely get.

One last note and a plug for more intensive line editing (OK, that's really more like free therapy for reporters, but we all need it sometimes): Carol really helped me get this story into shape and clarify my thoughts by talking with me as well as editing the story.

One day, we were working on it and I told her how happy one of the mothers was when she'd showed me the one picture of her son smiling like a regular kid in the photo -- just that little accomplishment being so important to her.

When I said it out loud to Carol, she immediately said, "That's your ending."

She was right. If we hadn't been so inside the story and talking about it, I might have missed that and not put that in.