Colorado schools start in the middle of August. Depending on your district, that gives you somewhere between two and four weeks from right now.
That is enough time to make the first week substantially easier. It is not enough time to do everything on the internet’s back-to-school checklists, and you should not try.
This is the version that fits in the time you actually have.
Is Summer Regression Real? Is It Normal?
This is worth answering honestly, because most of what you will read on this topic is written by people selling summer therapy hours.
The classic “summer slide” research from the 1980s claimed one to three months of lost learning over the break. When researchers reanalyzed a large modern national dataset of more than 17,000 children, those findings largely failed to replicate it. What they found was closer to two weeks of reading loss and a small gain in math. The field is genuinely contested, and there is a published rebuttal.
The finding that does hold up: almost all children learn more slowly during summer than during the school year. That is a different and much smaller claim than losing everything.
The autism-specific research is thinner than you would expect. The most directly relevant study, looking at 139 children ages five to nine years with autism spectrum disorders across a summer, found that students generally maintained their skills, and found few differences between children who attended extended school year programming and children who did not.
Regression is real for some children, particularly for recently acquired skills, and families and clinicians report it consistently. It is not universal, it is not automatic, and it is not a reason to panic in late July. What matters more than the average is your specific child’s history: what happened last August and the August before that.
If your child came back from previous summers having lost skills, plan accordingly. If they did not, plan for the transition instead, because that is where most of the difficulty actually lives.
What is Extended School Year, and Does My Child Qualify?
Extended School Year, or ESY, is special education programming provided outside the normal school year. It is a federal requirement, not a district favor, and the rules are more favorable to families than most parents realize.
Under federal regulation at 34 CFR 300.106, ESY services must be available as necessary to provide a free appropriate public education, must be determined by the IEP team on an individual basis, and a district may not limit ESY to particular categories of disability, and may not unilaterally limit the type, amount, or duration of those services.
That last clause is the one to know. Statement such as “We only do ESY for students with significant needs” and “Our ESY program is four weeks for everyone” are both contrary to the regulation.
Colorado’s Department of Education publishes an ESY Guidance Manual that defines the two terms the decision is based on:
Regression is the loss of skills or knowledge a student experiences during a break from school. Severe or substantial regression is loss that significantly jeopardizes the educational benefits accrued during the regular school year.
Recoupment is the amount of time it takes a student to recover skills and knowledge lost during a break.
CDE explicitly acknowledges that all students exhibit some regression over extended breaks. So regression alone is not the standard. The controlling question CDE poses is whether, without continued supports and services, the student will experience a loss of skills that significantly jeopardizes the educational benefits accrued during the regular school year.
The manual also lists what teams should consider beyond regression data: rate of progress, type and severity of disability, behavioral and physical needs, alternative resources available to the family, opportunities to interact with peers without disabilities, whether the curriculum requires continuous attention, and vocational needs.
What to do with this if you are reading it in late July. ESY for this summer has already happened or not happened. But the decision for next summer gets made this school year, and it gets made on data. So:
- Collect your own baseline now, in the last two weeks before school starts. Create a short written note on what your child can currently do independently in a few key areas, dated.
- Send it to the school team in the first week and ask that it be added to the file.
- In September, ask the team to document recoupment. How long did it take to get back to June’s level? That number is the evidence for next year’s ESY conversation.
- If ESY was denied this year, ask in writing for the data the team used, and ask that pre- and post-break data be collected this year.
A Realistic Three-Week Back-to-School Plan
Work backward from the first day. If you have fewer than three weeks, compress it and prioritize sleep and the school visit over everything else.
Three Weeks Out: Move the Clock
Sleep is the highest leverage variable and the slowest to shift. Move bedtime and wake time earlier by ten to fifteen minutes every two or three days. A two-hour shift attempted the night before school does not work and costs you the first week.
Do the same with meals. If lunch has been at 1:00 pm all summer, walk it back toward the school lunch period now, so the first day is not also a hunger day.
Start reintroducing structure to the mornings. Not school, just sequence. Get up, get dressed, eat, do something purposeful. Summer mornings are often unstructured in a way that makes the first school morning feel like a wall.
Two Weeks Out: Make the School Real Again
Visit the building. Call the front office and ask to visit. Most schools will let you walk the halls in the week or two before opening, and many are actively happy to. Walk the route from drop-off to the classroom, find the bathroom, find the cafeteria, find the office. If your child will be riding the bus, walk to the stop.
Get the teacher’s name and, if possible, a photo. Put it somewhere your child will see it repeatedly.
Write a social story. One page, first person, plain sentences, with photos from the visit. “In August I will go back to school. My teacher is Ms. Reyes. My classroom is on the second floor. When I get there, I will put my backpack on my hook.” Read it a few times a week, not every day, and not as a lesson.
Ask for the schedule. A daily schedule, in whatever form the school has it. You are going to turn this into a visual.
One Week Out: Run the Morning
Build the visual schedule. Place photos or icons for the morning sequence, in order, somewhere your child can see and move through them. Create the sequence only with steps that cause friction. A twelve-step schedule nobody follows is worse than a four-step schedule that works.
Do two full dress rehearsals. Real wake time, real clothes, real breakfast, drive or walk the real route, come home. This helps to avoid the first day being a novel event.
Deal with the clothes now. New clothes, new shoes, tags, and stiff fabric are a genuine sensory problem on a day that is already loaded. Wash everything, cut tags, and let your child wear the shoes around the house. If last year’s shirts still fit, the first week is not the moment for a new wardrobe.
Test the backpack and lunch. Practice opening every container. A container your child cannot open is twenty minutes of hunger and frustration you can prevent this week.
The First Week: Expect the Crash
Plan for your child to hold it together at school and fall apart at home. This is the most consistently reported pattern in the first two weeks of school, and it is not a sign the placement is wrong.
A full school day is an enormous load of noise, light, transitions, social demand, and unpredictability. Many children spend the entire day suppressing their response to it. Home is the first safe place to put it down, and it lands on you.
So protect the afternoons. Do not introduce new home activities the first two weeks. Create a predictable, low demand landing routine in the same order every day. Do not ask about school in the car. Provide food and quiet first, and offer conversation later, if at all.
What Should I Ask at the Start of the School Year?
Send one email in the first week. Short, warm, and specific. Then ask for a brief meeting in September once everyone has data.
Things worth putting in writing early:
- What worked last year, in two or three sentences. Not a document. The team will read three sentences.
- What overwhelms your child, and what the early signs look like before it escalates.
- What the break plan is. Where can your child go, how do they request it, and does requesting it require asking permission out loud in front of the class. That last detail decides whether the accommodation gets used.
- Who is the point of contact, and what is the preferred way to reach them.
- Whether the IEP or 504 is current, and whether any goals need updating after the summer.
If behavior was the central issue last year, ask two more:
- Is there a current functional behavior assessment? If a plan was written without one, it was written on a guess about why the behavior happens.
- Is there a current behavior intervention plan, and does every adult who works with my child know what is in it? A plan the paraprofessional and the specials teachers have never seen is not in effect.
You can request either in writing at any time. You do not have to wait for the annual review.
What Do I Do if My Child Refuses to Go to School?
School refusal usually shows up in weeks two through four, once the novelty has worn off and the accumulated load has built.
Before treating it as a behavior problem, get specific about the pattern. Which day, which time, which class, which room. Refusal that is really about the cafeteria at 11:40, or the fire drill nobody warned anyone about, or the hallway between third and fourth period, has a solvable cause. Refusal that is general and constant is a different conversation.
What tends to help: identifying the specific trigger rather than the general fear, reducing the demand temporarily rather than removing school entirely, building a predictable and short entry routine, and getting a plan in writing with the school rather than negotiating it fresh every morning.
What tends not to help: escalating consequences, long conversations at the door, and any approach that makes the morning a negotiation. If a child has learned that mornings are negotiable, mornings become the fight.
If it persists past a couple of weeks, ask the school for a meeting and for data. Persistent refusal is a signal that something in the environment is not working, and it is worth finding rather than overpowering.
What should we do in the next two weeks if we do nothing else?
If you take one thing from this:
- Move bedtime. Start tonight, fifteen minutes at a time.
- Visit the school building. Call tomorrow.
- Write the three-sentence email to the teacher.
- Do one full dress rehearsal.
- Clear your calendar for the first two weeks after school starts.
Everything else is optional. Those five change the first week more than the rest combined.
Where ABA Fits In a School transition
Behavior analysis is useful here in a specific way, and it is worth being clear about the scope.
A BCBA can help you identify what specifically makes a transition hard for your child rather than treating “transitions” as one undifferentiated problem. That means looking at antecedents–the conditions that reliably precede a difficult moment–and changing them. It means teaching the practical skills the school day requires, including asking for a break, following a visual schedule independently, and tolerating waiting. And, it means building your own strategies through parent training so that the morning routine works whether or not a therapist is in the house.
It also means coordinating with the school so that the plan at home and the plan at school are the same plan. That coordination is often the whole difference, and it is the part that most commonly does not happen. Our practical guide to supporting your child at home covers the routines side in more depth.
What ABA is not is a substitute for a good school plan. If the IEP is not being implemented, that is a school conversation, and no amount of after school therapy solves it.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
If last school year was hard, this is the moment to change the setup rather than repeat it and hope.
OGBC works with families across Colorado in-clinic, at home, and in schools. We can help you build the transition plan, and we can be at the table with your school team.
We’re here when you’re ready to talk.
Reach Out
School starts in a few weeks. Contact us if you want help before it does.
