For Martial Arts School Owners

Autism in Your School

What It Is, How to Teach It, and Why You Shouldn’t Build a Special Needs Class

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. · August 24, 2026

A parent brings a 7-year-old in for a trial lesson. The kid won’t come off the lobby bench. The door buzzer goes off behind them and they cover both ears… and now the parent is apologizing to you, which they’ve probably already done at three other schools.

A different owner has an autistic student on the floor during a prospect’s second lesson, the student is having a hard day, and the owner is watching a prospective family watch it.

Both of those are real, and underneath they’re the same question. What do I do, and what is it costing me?

A school owner asked me a version of it. Some of these kids do great, some are disruptive, he believes the disruptive ones may be scaring off enrollments, and he asked whether he should start a special ed class.

No. Not ever. Owners get this one wrong more than anything else, and the kids pay for it.

There’s a companion article on ADHD, and you want both, because the two diagnoses co-occur constantly.

This one isn’t neutral for me. My son was diagnosed with autism before he was three and couldn’t speak intelligibly at four. I put him in our program at three years old, terrified that he’d look bad (embarrassed that I might look bad), with five schools at the time. He ended up winning tournaments, being the captain of his football team (and being all division in the state), star on the track team, graduate ASU magna cum laude, and even better a great instructor. Having him in our program was a huge part of it.

I also wrote the parent-facing book on this, Parent Action Plan! Autism!. Some of what follows shows up there in a version written for the families instead of for you.

Part 1: Identify, Don’t Diagnose

One in Thirty-One Kids…

The CDC’s monitoring network identified autism in about 1 in 31 eight-year-olds in 2022, up from 1 in 36 two years earlier, across 16 sites (Shaw et al., 2025). Boys are identified at about 3.4 times the rate of girls. One note on the controversy about these increasing prevalence rates. One note on controversy about these increasing prevalence rates: the opinion here (and agreed on by experts all across the field) is that these increasing rates are a product of earlier identification and not changing environmental factors.

Denmark has the cleanest data on this because the country keeps a national registry. Hansen and colleagues found that changes in reporting practices accounted for 60% of the increase in children born 1980–1991. That’s 33% from the change in diagnostic criteria alone, and 42% from simply starting to count outpatient contacts (Hansen et al., 2015). Nobody’s environment changed. The counting did.

California shows the same direction at a smaller size. King and Bearman attributed about a quarter of the increase in diagnosed autism from 1992 to 2005 to changes in diagnostic practice, including diagnostic substitution, where a child who would once have been recorded with an intellectual disability is now recorded with autism (King & Bearman, 2009).

You’ll hear a counter-argument, so know the answer to it. Some researchers point out that intellectual disability prevalence stayed flat in most states while autism climbed, and argue that this rules out diagnostic substitution. That argument only works if you assume the substitution had to come from intellectual disability. It didn’t. Asperger’s syndrome, PDD-NOS and childhood disintegrative disorder were all folded into one autism diagnosis in 2013, and most of the growth has been in children who never carried an intellectual disability label at all.

The numbers back that up. Furnier and colleagues tracked prevalence by functioning level from 2000 to 2016 and found autism with mild, borderline or no adaptive challenges rose from 5.1 to 17.6 per 1,000 children, while autism with moderate to profound challenges actually went DOWN slightly, 1.5 to 1.2 (Furnier et al., 2026). The increase was larger for autism without co-occurring intellectual disability.

The population that grew is the one that used to get no label, or a different label. Intellectual disability rates holding steady is exactly what you’d expect.

Those are the kids who got identified… which means that number still won’t necessarily capture every autistic child. What does it look like in your school? If you have any reputation at all for handling kids well, you’ll have more than the population rate. Three–four percent of your students carrying something on this spectrum is normal, and a lot of them arrive undiagnosed with a parent who just says their kid “doesn’t listen.”

It Is Not One Thing…

Autism isn’t a disease. It’s not like the flu, where there’s a strain and a treatment. It’s a spectrum of characteristics that clinicians grouped into one diagnosis, and one autistic student can look almost nothing like the next one, in symptoms and in severity.

Two broad areas define it in the DSM-5-TR – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, text revision, published by the American Psychiatric Association and the book a clinician actually opens to decide whether a child meets criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. That second bucket covers repetitive movement, insistence on sameness, narrow intense interests, and over- or under-reaction to sensory input. Symptoms have to be present early and cause real impairment.

Two vocabulary points that will help you look more professional. Asperger’s syndrome is no longer a diagnosis, since it was folded in when the DSM manual changed, though parents and some family doctors still use the word (and don’t correct them.) And “high functioning” is an informal label, not a diagnosis. It often gets used for autistic people without an intellectual disability, but it may tell you a little about the support a particular student needs.

What Else Is Usually Going On

Autism may have other challenges go along with it. In 159 children and adolescents with high-functioning autism, ADHD and anxiety disorders both showed up in high percentages, along with depressive disorders, bipolar disorder, and OCD (Margari et al., 2019). Boys and girls in that sample looked statistically the same on comorbidity, with anorexia nervosa the one exception.

The behavior in front of you may be the anxiety, or the ADHD, and not the autism, and those may need different responses from you.

Girls get identified later. Part of that may sit in the adults rather than in the girls. In one study, laypeople rating vignettes of a child’s behavior showed no gender difference in perceived symptom severity at age 5, but rated boys as more likely to be seen as atypical by peers at 15 (Geelhand et al., 2019). That was a vignette study, not a clinic sample, so read it as a signal about adult expectations and not as a measure of the true girls neurodiversity.

The same late-identification pattern is documented on the ADHD side, where an expert consensus statement on females with ADHD concluded that girls and women are under-recognized and identified later, largely because inattention rather than hyperactivity is the predominant presentation and it doesn’t disrupt anything (Young et al., 2020).

Since so many of these students carry both, a quiet girl in class may be the one nobody has evaluated for either.

What It Looks Like on Your Floor

Social: they don’t chat with the other kids, they’d rather work alone (my son would do puzzles by himself all day, which was honestly convenient for me at the time as a single dad but this can be an indicator), and pulling them out of an activity they’re absorbed in can set off a real reaction. Transition anxiety – make sure you prepare an autistic person with warning before changing states.

Communication: delayed speech, words in odd order, trouble sustaining a conversation, no eye contact. This one matters more than any of the others for us, because they take what you say literally. Most of what we communicate as instructors is tone and body language, and that’s exactly the part they’re not getting. When you say “get on your spot,” and your hand is pointing, and your voice is doing the work, how much of that is landing? Some of it lands as noise. Be as specific and clear as possible (good idea with all students).

Repetitive: hand flapping, twirling, arranging objects in a fixed order and getting upset when it’s changed. A lot of this is stimming, which is self-regulating behavior and mostly not a problem to be solved (I’ve written a longer clinical piece on that, see The Hard Case: Autism and Stimming).

Sameness: they want the day, and the class, to run in the order they expect.

Sensory: a noise (a yell or clapping targets together), the buzz of the lights, the crack of an x-ray paper target. They can be hyper-reactive or hypo-reactive (over-responding or under-responding to the same input), and either one shows up as a behavior you’d otherwise read as defiance, anger or anxiety.

Changing the Plan…

Sr. Master Sanborn said this better than I do. If you announce at the start of class that you’re doing three things, and then you change one of them mid-class, some of these students will melt down. Not because they’re being difficult, but because the plan they were holding is gone. Same goes for tacking on an extra 10 minutes at the end that nobody prepped them for.

Set the goal and keep it. Same opening, same transitions, same closing, every class (the little rituals count too, where they bow in, where they line up), and vary what’s inside it. The same structure every class is what makes them settled enough to work on something new. Most schools do the reverse! The material stays identical for months while the structure of class drifts depending on who’s teaching that night. Again, good rules for all students.

You’ll still have to change things sometimes, and they’ll still occasionally hear something you didn’t say. Don’t get upset about that either. Part of what we’re teaching is tolerating a change, and the world isn’t going to run on their schedule. Just don’t hand it to them cold.

What Actually Causes Autism?

What causes it? Nobody has one answer, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. Genes and environmental factors both appear to play a role. Older parents, certain genetic conditions, a sibling with autism, and very low birth weight are associated with a higher likelihood, but none of them gives you a simple cause-and-effect explanation (National Institute of Mental Health, n.d.).

There are no studies or evidence that vaccines cause autism. A meta-analysis covering more than 1.2 million children found no relationship, not for vaccination generally, not for MMR specifically, and not for thimerosal or mercury (Taylor et al., 2014). The single study that started this idea was retracted and its author lost his license. There is a lot more that could be said and is being said on the topic, but it’s not for this paper.

Diet is the other thing that’s purported as causing autism symptoms. The evidence on gluten-free and casein-free diets is not established, and removing them is not an established treatment for autism. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis found no effect on clinician-reported core symptoms, parent-reported functional level, or behavioral difficulties, while rating the evidence low to very low (Keller et al., 2021). If a family wants to try dietary changes for gastrointestinal problems, fine, but they should do it with their doctor or dietitian and they shouldn’t drop the treatments that work (martial arts is one of them).

A Family Doctor May Not Specialize in This

You’ll have parents tell you their pediatrician said not to worry. Take that seriously and don’t treat it as final.

A survey of family physicians in Turkey found their autism awareness inadequate (Altay, 2019). Two-thirds had received no education on autism at all, 70.8% hadn’t referred a single child to child psychiatry with suspected autism in six months, and 56.3% named one or more clinical features that don’t occur in autism. Their answers matched the DSM-5 criteria about 55% of the time.

That’s not a knock on family doctors, who are covering an impossible amount of ground. It’s the reason a parent with a real concern needs a developmental pediatrician, a child psychiatrist, or a psychologist who specializes, and it’s a useful thing to know when a parent tells you their doctor waved it off. This is something to get additional support on.

Screening tools have the same limit. The Childhood Autism Rating Scale is one of the common ones, and a meta-analysis of 24 studies covering 4,433 participants found acceptable internal consistency and acceptable sensitivity, but the specificity didn’t hold up, so the authors concluded it should be used alongside other confirmatory tools (Moon et al., 2019). A score is an indicator, not a diagnosis.

What the Diagnosis Actually Gets You

Parents will tell you they don’t want their kid labeled. Is that a reasonable fear? Of course! I however suggest that the diagnosis is important so I’ll tell them so from my own experience.

The diagnosis is what unlocked occupational therapy, speech therapy, and state services for my son, and it made his school pay attention. I was in tears the day we got the diagnosis, a grown man crying because I thought my kid might not get a normal life. In the end, getting diagnosis got him many things he needed.

A parent heading into an evaluation needs to hear this. Don’t minimize what’s happening. Parents instinctively soften (“they do okay in that area”) and then the impairment threshold may not be met, so there’s no diagnosis and no services. The clinician can’t diagnose without significant impairment. Describe the hard days as accurately as the good ones. For more on this take a look at my book Parent Action Plan! Autism! on Amazon.

Let’s be clear though – this is all for your information, not so you provide a diagnosis. Just like with ADHD, it informs you and allows you to suggest gently with a parent whom you’re having a conversation with about these behaviors: “It may be something you can bring up with your pediatrician and perhaps get a referral.”

Part 2: Teaching!

Working With Kids With Autism Is Just Good Instruction

Almost none of this is autism-specific, and everything that works for these students makes you better with EVERY other student on the floor.

What the Research Says

The best-established intervention is early intensive behavioral intervention, built on applied behavior analysis, delivered 20–40 hours a week over years. A Cochrane review of five studies covering 219 children found the evidence supports EIBI for some children with autism, with the authors themselves rating the quality of that evidence as weak (Reichow et al., 2018). Five studies is not a mountain of proof. My son got 10 hours a week, not 40, because that’s what was covered, and it still helped.

Look at what it actually is, though. Repetitive practice on defined behaviors, reinforced immediately, escalating over a long period. What does that sound like? A martial arts class. A belt system. Rewards. We’re not doing therapy and I’d never claim we are, but we use some of the same behavioral principles, several hours a week, for years, and the kid enjoys it.

What if a skeptical parent says this is just martial arts people promoting martial arts? Fair question, and the answer comes from outside our industry. Diamond and Lee’s review in Science of every program shown to improve executive function in children 4 to 12 found the successful ones all shared two features. Repeated practice, and progressively increasing demand (Diamond & Lee, 2011). That’s your curriculum described by a developmental scientist.

The earlier they start the better. A three-year-old (like my son) starting is in a completely different position from a ten-year-old starting. If you run a preschool program, that isn’t a warm-up class, it’s an important developmental activity!

Catch Them Doing It Right, and Do It Immediately

The most common failure I see with these students isn’t harshness. It’s a well-meaning instructor delivering a steady stream of small corrections. “Switch your foot.” “Look this way.” “Over here.” None of it intended as negative, all of it landing that way. Twenty corrections in ten minutes will shut a kid down.

Reverse the ratio. What are they doing right? Look for that and reinforce it on the spot, verbally, with a sticker, with a high five (watching for touch sensitivity). A reward at the end of class is too far from the behavior to attach to it. I keep small stickers in my uniform and I use a lot of them.

If they can’t get the correct foot forward but they got A foot forward, that’s the rep you reward. You’re looking for movement in the right direction. The finished product comes later. As with any student the early year (or years) is to get them trained to be a student and train towards Black Belt and Beyond, not to lean move X or Y.

I want good Black Belts. I’m not looking for great White Belts. These students might take four years to reach Black Belt where another kid takes three, and on my schools they’ll be great when they get there.

What about the rest of the class watching a student do it wrong? Your other students are supposed to be doing what you told them regardless of what anybody else in the room is doing. That’s what discipline is. If one student drifting on the end of the line breaks the whole class, the issue isn’t that student the class discipline is.

Sensory Issues…

Noise-canceling headphones for kids with hearing sensitivity can solve the problem for some kids, and plenty of parents show up already carrying them (the over-the-ear ones are very good now). Swap x-ray paper for pool noodles when the crack of the paper is the issue. Watch the door, the music volume, the mirrors.

The goal is to bring them along and, without changing them, help them adapt… just like they have to do in life. A permanent bubble of special treatment is not ok. Parents want to take this kid bowling. They want to take them to Disneyland. Occupational therapists do sensory integration work for exactly that reason and they do it gradually, so don’t drop a sound-sensitive kid cold into a loud class, and don’t leave them in headphones forever if they can be acclimated out of them.

Spots on the floor help enormously, for every student, not just the ones who need them. A student who knows exactly where they belong is usually compliant about going there. It’s clarity not a crutch.

Again, just like all students, teach gross motor first and fine motor later (they can learn the movement long before they can learn the detail of it). And skip the goofy stuff – I never want my classes to look like Romper Room (outdated reference…). No bubbles, no games that make the floor look like a playground. Save that for a parent night out. It’s still martial arts, and the parents chose martial arts for discipline, confidence, respect and safety.

Bullying and ADHD…

Among adolescents with autism, 46.3% were victimized, 14.8% perpetrated, and 8.9% did both in a nationally representative sample (Sterzing et al., 2012). Roughly half are being bullied, and that’s a big part of why the family is standing in your lobby.

Zeedyk et al. (2014) interviewed 13-year-olds and their mothers separately and found youth with autism were victimized more often than peers with an intellectual disability or with typical development, and the impact on them was worse. What predicted it? Internalizing problems and conflict in friendships, and in that sample both mattered MORE than the autism diagnosis by itself. It was a small interview study, so hold it loosely.

The student who gets targeted may already be anxious and struggling with friendships, and a martial arts school is one of the few places that can work on the second half of that sentence.

Now the perpetration side. I used to tell owners in seminars that kids with autism bully at roughly twice the rate. That was wrong. Montes and Halterman (2007) found 44% prevalence of bullying behavior among children with autism nationally, then split the group: children with autism and no ADHD were NOT at greater risk than the general population, while children with autism and ADHD had 4.6 times the odds, even after controlling for income, age, and gender.

In that study, comorbid ADHD marked the higher-risk group. The student to watch in partner work isn’t the one with the autism diagnosis, it’s the one carrying both, and now you know which question to ask the parent.

Watch partner work the way you’d watch it anyway. I had one student, 15 years old and six feet tall, training in the kids’ class, and we simply never paired him with a two-foot-tall White Belt. That isn’t an autism policy, that’s ordinary supervision.

For more on bullying, you can read my #1 Amazon Bestselling book Bullying! Truths, Myths and What To Do!.

Part 3: A Business Decision

Screening Happens at the Introductory Lesson, Not in Week Three

Everything the owner asked me about traces back to one thing. Kids got into regular class before anybody found out whether they could handle regular class.

Do one-on-one introductory lessons initially. Every student, every time, no exceptions. Not “come try a class and we’ll see,” because that’s not an evaluation, that’s abdicating your ability to evaluate the student. We’re serious that the first lesson is an evaluation… NOT for the parent or the student to evaluate US but for US to evaluate THEM.

Three outcomes:

A. They handle the intro fine. Enroll them. If the move into regular class is rough, run a few short private lessons to acclimate / train them and move on. (by the way – that’s true for any student with an issue).

B. They struggle in the intro, but you believe you can get them there. Run a few privates and reassess. The bar at the end is PARTICIPATION in a regular class. Not perfection. Participation.

C. They can’t participate and you don’t believe they will (too young, or behavior severe enough that it isn’t workable right now). Then you say so, honestly and kindly, and you tell the parent what would need to change.

C should be rare, and owners reach for it far too quickly. Severe means a student with very high support needs who can’t participate safely under typical circumstances, even with reasonable preparation. That’s a small group, and it is not the kid who had a rough class last week.

And C isn’t always a no forever. Sometimes it’s “not at this age.” Sometimes it’s a few sessions to acclimate them and then a real look. Sometimes it’s a referral to somebody better set up for that child right now, and you should know who that is in your town before you need them. What you don’t do is enroll them, hope, and let it come apart in front of everybody four months later.

Nearly every student we’ve ever put through B has ended up in regular class shortly after.

Don’t Build a Special Needs Class

I’ve seen this attempted repeatedly and it fails the same way each time. It becomes a distraction for the instructors, it doesn’t produce good martial artists, and the math never works! Even at 10% of your student body you can’t staff enough sections for it to be a real program.

The bigger objection is the kids. The entire point is acclimating them to a regular environment with regular expectations, and a separate class teaches them they belong in a separate class. Grand Master Stephen Oliver’s word for it is counterproductive, and he’s right.

Owners assume a separate class protects these students’ feelings. It does the opposite. Watch a parent whose child has struggled everywhere else see that child hold their own in the regular class, in the same uniform, doing the same curriculum. That’s the thing they came for.

Elementary schools often use a similar model, pulling a student out for specific services and putting them back in the regular room. That model is used across almost every severity level. You’ve got them 30–60 minutes, two or three times a week. They can manage that.

Group by ability, never by diagnosis. If a student can’t carry memorized material yet, they go in the class where the curriculum is led rather than memorized. Some 6-year-olds belong with the 8-year-olds and some 9-year-olds belong with the younger group. Nobody announces why. It’s just “this is that group.”

That’s one reason the “Tiny Tigers” (or Dragons or whatever you call it) is not designated as a “preschool class.” It’s just the “Tiny Tigers” class once they enroll, and maybe there is an 8-year-old who is better served by this ability grouping until they develop. The group is named for what it is, never for who is in it, and that one naming decision does more for these families than any policy you could write.

Some notes on inclusion: A meta-analysis found a small-to-medium positive effect on cognitive outcomes and no significant effect on psychosocial outcomes (Krämer et al., 2021). It’s not overwhelming that inclusion is the best in elementary schools but consider that teachers have much more sit-and-work activities for a longer period of time. You don’t have the same situation (see above) and your classes are built for what works for these kids.

The Parent Is A Support Structure…

For a student who needs it, keep the parent in class in a severe case. The better solution is for all parents to take the introductory lesson and be in the classes as a real student. The only time the parent would be a helper rather than a student is if the child is very severe (<4% of cases) and the chils has to be helped with basic functioning needs (you can decide if you want to take these kids – we do!).

As far as if the parent is in the class, or in a parent waiting area, the parent NEVER directs their own child. No pointing, no coaching from the bench, no “watch the instructor.” That’s 100% our job. When a parent starts, you don’t hold a meeting about it, you just say “we’ve got them, we’ll let them know” and keep teaching. As before this goes for all students.

What you don’t do is schedule an extra instructor every time a particular student shows up. That’s a recipe for a broken schedule and a broken payroll and more headaches. Staff your floor by class size and difficulty like you should be doing anyway (I always design my curriculum and systems so one instructor can handle everything on their own).

Charge Full Price, and Renew Them to Leadership

Should you discount for a diagnosis? No. Same rates. I’ve had instructors tell me they charge less because a kid has autism, and it’s backwards.

Understand what you’re looking at, though. A review of roughly 50 papers across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands found families with an autistic child carry higher costs across six categories, with education costs a major component for parents (Rogge & Janssen, 2019). Medical care, therapy, schooling, lost work for the caregiver, out-of-pocket everything.

Does that mean you charge them less? No, and this is where owners get sentimental and hurt everybody. It means you’re empathetic about the schedule and the load, and you never apologize for the rate. These families are among the most motivated you’ll ever enroll, and a family paying real money shows up. If you teach for free, you’ll be the thing that gets dropped on a hard week.

Renew them into leadership like everybody else. Our renewal/upgrade rate (students who enroll in leadership) with special needs families runs higher than our overall rate, because these parents want the development and not just the kicking. It’s an easier enrollment and an easier renewal, because the parent is looking for a backstop and you’re it.

Instructor program is the same answer with one adjustment. First job is making them a good martial artist. Certification in our school takes three years and a lot of memorization, and we don’t lower that standard for anybody! A student who can meet it, gets accepted into the instructor training, if not they don’t.

The Marketing…

Where do you actually find these families? Local autism walks can draw thousands of people, so get a booth. You won’t only meet families of autistic kids. You’ll meet the whole community that turned out to support the cause, which is a large and very warm crowd. We’ve pulled a hundred appointments off a single event!

Clinics are better. Find the pediatric practices and therapy clinics that see these kids, schedule time with their staff, and tell them what you actually do (if you need help, I have developed a presentation for these groups I am happy to share). The first occupational therapist I ever did this with told me she’d been referring families to karate for years and never knew who to send them to. Now she knew and we got lots of great referrals.

Referrals inside your own school work the same way once parents see that you handle it (and they will see it, because parents watch every class from that bench), because every one of them knows somebody whose kid is struggling. Often these families are part of groups that you can present at or do a promotional event at.

One note: vet the organizations you attach your name to and make sure they align with your school’s values.

The Problem May Be Discipline, Not Their Diagnosis

For most of you this may not apply. But if it does, it’s the whole answer and everything above is detail.

I look at a class, when I evaluate my instructors, and evaluate DISCIPLINE first, then motivation, then knowledge. If discipline isn’t there I don’t evaluate the curriculum at all, because none of it is getting absorbed anyway.

Most owners have that order backwards. They’re worried about getting the form memorized or learning the drill before testing, and the class isn’t behaving well enough for any of it to stick.

What is discipline? Our definition is “Learning To Push Myself Even When It’s Hard”. Which means somebody has to first decide what the target behaviors are (that the student needs to “push to”), then reinforce them consistently.

The Whole Discipline System Is Already Recorded

Defining target behaviors, running the three zones, and the 1-2-3 consequence system with time-outs is its own seminar, and I’ve already taught the whole thing (Phelan, 2016; Porzig-Drummond et al., 2014). It’s free and it’s here: the Ultimate Class Management and Discipline Seminar. Watch it with your instructors and by yourself.

One thing from it matters specifically for autistic students. That system doesn’t require the child to process a speech about why the behavior was wrong, and that’s exactly why it works here. I learned it when my son was three and couldn’t speak, and it still stopped him. Less talk, less emotion.

What a Visitor Sees

A disruptive class doesn’t cost you the trial student because of the autistic kid. It costs you because a visitor watched an instructor lose the mat.

Fix the system and that same student stops looking like a problem to anybody watching. The standard of discipline in the room becomes obvious – to the students, to your staff, and to the parent sitting in the waiting area with a decision to make.

And the class gets MORE fun, not less. That surprises people’s intuition. A disciplined class (just like games with clear rules) is more fun and you get a lot more done.

What to Do This Week

Run your introductory lessons so nobody gets into a regular class unscreened. Keep every student you accept in the regular program, grouped by ability and never by diagnosis. Set the frame of class identically every time and vary what’s inside it. Charge full rates and renew them like everybody else.

Then go talk to one clinic this month. That’s a referral pipeline nobody in your market is working and the occupational therapists and psychologists are waiting for somebody to call.

And before you change one thing about how you handle autism specifically, spend a week watching your own classes for discipline only. Not curriculum. Discipline.

Try this: pick one class and watch one of your instructors and count two things – how many times they correct, and how many times they praise a student who was already doing it right. If that second number isn’t at least five times the first, you’ve found your starting point, and it isn’t the kid. (For more specific versions of this reach out to me for an Instructor Grade Sheet and you’ll have it all!)

These students and these families can be some of the best in your school. Watching one of them earn a Black Belt will put you in tears, and I’m not exaggerating (because it just happened to me our last Black Belt Event). They become role models… later instructors and one day they may start their own school… because you helped them that much!