As many of you may already know, last month was Autism Awareness Month. However, a good majority of the American population is not very informed on Autism. I spent last month waiting for something to be said or something to be done involving autism awareness, but nothing happened. This was incredibly disappointing to me, as Prep seems to always push to form us students into adults who are knowledgeable, understanding, and committed to doing justice. Standing idly by during Autism Awareness Month doesn’t display the spirit that this school has! I think that we need a change for next year. We need to have an assembly of all students in the school,and have a discussion about autism because simply giving out pins or ribbons declaring the existence of autism is not enough. We need to change the way we think about autism and begin to understand it more during the month of April.

I’m not writing this to villainize anybody. I understand that autism is usually a sensitive topic, and talking about it can be very difficult at times. But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done. I’ve been working with children on the autism spectrum for two years now, and, although it has been difficult, I have grown a lot as a person from my service. In fact, my service is what motivated me to write this. I believe that this is an incredibly important topic to discuss with students, who probably have not been educated on Autism, like most of America. I also want to clarify that I don’t know much about autism either, which is part of the reason why I want this talk to happen. A talk like this would help us grow as students and as men, grow our society into one that is more understanding of the people that struggle within it, and encourage people to volunteer to help those who are on the spectrum.