12 year old commits suicide after being bullied for alopecia

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

48. So true.

My older son, the one who went bald at age 4, is also on the spectrum. Asperger's, although it's no longer a diagnosis, which I think is a shame, because it fit him perfectly. In fact, when someone suggested to me that he might have Asperger's, and I looked it up, I felt as if they'd studied him before they wrote the definition.

Among the reasons he was bullied was that in an excellent elementary school in a very good public school district -- the Shawnee Mission School district in Kansas -- he was an oddity because he was far more interested in academics and learning than in what the Kansas City Chiefs had done that Sunday.

Because of his Asperger's, he tended not to notice how different he was. Although in 6th grade, the school counselor, who was VERY aware of such things, had noticed no one would sit with him at lunch, and simply had him eat lunch with her.

In the fall of my son's 6th grade year a friend, another mom, whose older son was a year ahead of mine, called me up to say, "Look, I know you've said private school could be a possibility for your kid, and here is why you cannot send him to the middle school." She then laid out what was happening with her son, a year older than mine, who was NOT Aspie, but who'd been bullied in grade school and now things were much worse at the middle school. It was horrifying. They wound up moving their son from the local middle school to a different one in the district, driving him to and from every day, just to remove him from the neighborhood bullies. And this was a kid somewhat capable of defending himself.

Which my son was not. We wound up sending him to a local independent secular school, and it turned out to be the best thing we could possibly have done. For a while I said (and I meant it) that I'd have cheerfully scrubbed toilets to have paid for his tuition. We were very fortunate in that my husband's parents had the financial resources and willingness to pay for his tuition. Here's the important thing. At the new school his being smart was valued and admired. He did Science Bowl all the way through high school, and in his junior and senior years his team went to National Science Bowl. The local competition, in Kansas City, was by far the most competitive. Over one hundred teams competed, so many that Kansas City was the ONLY place that sent two teams to Nationals.