Alright, so the way it worked at my previous employer was as follows: Each support professional was paired up with a kid, and you assisted them with their daily routine (wake up, eat, get ready for school, etc). They were always hiring, and the turnover rate was insanely high due to how terrible the job and pay rate were. I really, really needed a gig at the time, though, so I bit the bullet.
There were five kids in the high-intensity autism ward when I was working there, and most of them were going to be in the system for life. A few of the kids were more high-functioning than others, but all of them would have violent or self-harming episodes now and again. And when I say violent, I mean violent.
Most of the employees there were women half my size, so whenever a restraint needed to be performed, I was always the one who had to initiate it. We had these 'company-approved' restraints we were permitted to do, which absolutely 100% did not work. They were designed not to harm the kids, which is commendable, but when an almost 6 foot 18-year-old is trying to gouge your fucking eyes out, you're not going to be able to remember some fruity technique they taught you in a 30 minute course.
Anyway, the kids. I won't name them, or give away anything too specific, but I'll detail a bit about each of them in every post. Let's start with Harold (not his real name).
Harold was eighteen, and was somewhere in the ballpark of 5'10-5'11. He had autism and what I can only assume was EXTREME obsessive compulsive disorder. This guy had to psych himself up for 10-20 minutes just to get through a doorway. As you can imagine, getting him to school on time was a complete fool's errand, but we tried anyway.
Harold would also get extremely agitated when things weren't just so. Once he mustered up the courage to make it out of his room, he would walk around and turn every single light in the building off. If you turned the lights back on when he went into the bathroom for a shower, he would know, and he would get very angry. Oftentimes he would take hours just to get himself into the bathroom, despite constant encouragement, so we devised a system--you remember those flat little scooter things kids would get in gym class at school? We tied a few of those together with bedsheets, and found it was a lot easier to get him seated on there to drag him into the bathroom than wait for him to do it himself.
Due to his difficulty with transitioning between spaces, he would often soil himself before reaching the bathroom. As a result, he had to wear an adult diaper. When he was sufficiently agitated, Harold would force himself to defecate, and then reach into his diaper and produce his little gift for all to see. From here, he'd smear his foul leavings all over walls, desks, coworkers--really whatever he could get his hands on.
Cleaning up after this kid was a nightmare. I remember setting about this grim task with a coworker on several occasions, which consisted of making an improvised t-shirt out of a trash bag to protect our clothes, then spraying bleach just about everywhere. It was convenient when he smeared in the bathroom, because we could just spray water from a hose all over the walls/floors due to the drain in the floor. When it was in his bedroom, however, we had to mop up the floors and wipe his shit off the walls with paper towels.
Harold would also get 'stuck' outside on his walk to school occasionally. He'd zero in on a patch of grass, then sit there autistically picking at it for HOURS if you let him. There wasn't a protocol for this when we first got the kid, so the first time it happened, he literally sat there picking grass for six or seven hours before he was satisfied. From that point on, we had a rule to 'escort' him when he had been doing it for twenty minutes.
He'd get angry when being pressured to leave, and attacked me on multiple occasions. Harold would screech at the top of his lungs and try to gouge at you with his fingernails, which may not sound too bad (compared to some of the kids, who would actually try to use weapons). It was bad. This kid was lanky and possibly double-jointed at the wrist--I don't know how he did it, but he'd still be clawing you no matter what restraint you tried. I have dozens of nasty scars on my hands and arms from dealing with him. If you had to put this kid in a restraint, you were going to bleed.
I'm sure I don't need to mention the sanitary concerns of a kid who smears poop scratching the fuck out of you with his shitty fingernails. I got a tetanus shot, sure, but I'm still lucky I didn't contract some kind of disease. That being said, he was honestly one of the easier kids to deal with. Him taking hours to transition meant you were sitting in a chair most of the time, and I got to watch a lot of youtube as a result. I don't really feel bad about it--they were paying 12 dollars an hour for people to go through this fresh hell.
I'll tell some more stories about the other kids if people like this one enough. They were all special in their own unique ways. I didn't really hate them, and the job could be pretty rewarding at times when you actually taught them to do something. I mostly hated the employer.
