I have thought about it. He does not handle change well and gets extremely upset thinking about a different school. I am not ruling it out though. He moves to Middle School for 5th grade next year.

Have you thought about trying a different school? My son attended a charter school for two years for having similar problems as your son does. He really liked it. However, their special ed program was lacking so now that he is older he is in the public middle school. He is getting more services then even before, but still prefers the charter school he attended for 4th and 5th grade.

We are trying to offer rewards for good days and everyday he is offered time to listen to music/computer time. He can't find the words to describe what is going on. All we get is "I want to go home". The staff has their minds made up that he is aware and just doing this because he isn't getting his way. I honestly don't know if I am just being protective or if there is more to it. I don't know how to help him. He says he has friends and even likes parts of school. Just the morning or ISS sets him off.

We had this issue and what we did was give him something to look forward to. At the start of his day, my son was allowed some space and some time to do a puzzle that he liked. To transition him back to classroom time, he was promised more time to work on his puzzle during break times. And when there was a meltdown during the day, his puzzle was again another way to calm him down. When he was older, we gave him an ipod to go listen to in space outside the classroom. For my son, these were ways of controlling anxiety. He didn't like the overwhelming noise that came with all the kids coming in at the start of the day. When he reached high school, he started school an hour late to make sure he didnt have to deal with all of the morning noise and commotion.

My question would be why is is doing this all of a sudden. Oftentimes there is a reason for this so you have to get to the bottom of it and find out what had happened at school to cause this. Sometimes it is another student sometimes it is staff but I would bet something happened.

The school may not even know what has happened, but they often do and do not want to admit to it. We had this happen in FL with our son. The schools here in MA tell us everything and our son has not had any issues. They know we will question things, and they are also pretty good to us so we have open communication.