The first time Maya Wechsler communicated with her 14-year-old autistic son, her emotions were a mix of sadness and joy. Sadness, because they had for years not been able to talk with him, and joy because she knew that her son’s life would be forever changed — and so too would hers.
Maximus “Max” Masucci, a student at Harmony Middle School in Hamilton, is the son of Purcellville residents Greg Masucci and Maya Wechsler. The couple are co-founders of A Farm Less Ordinary, which provides people with intellectual and development disabilities with the opportunity for employment and job training. They also have a 12-year-old daughter named Delilah.
Max stopped talking around the age of four due to what his parents said was severe autism.
They worked with doctors and therapists, and sought any possible means — such as sign language — to try to communicate with Max, to no avail.
One of the therapies they tried was a method of communicating using a letter board, however, it was not effective the first time. About a year ago, they decided to give it another try.
The letter board offers a means of communication known as a “rapid prompting method.” The concept is that a teacher or parent holds up an alphabet board and the child can point to the letters and spell out words.
While some research has questioned the validity of the method, it has worked in some cases, including with Max.
Since learning to use the letter board last year, Max has been communicating with his family and therapists. Not only that, but they discovered that Max, despite not being able to speak, is not intellectually challenged, as doctors had suggested, but rather he is highly intelligent.
Wechsler said the way the letter board approach works is that a person starts with small single letter choices and works up to open-ended questions. One of the first questions they asked him was ‘when did you learn to read?’
He responded saying he learned to read at the age of eight by reading magazines while sitting on the toilet.
“It was a little heartbreaking that he was 13 by the time we figured this out,” Wechsler said. “He had been trapped in there doing simplistic things and not really getting much of an education.”
By using the letter board, Max wrote an essay about his experience of living with autism and submitted it to a middle school essay contest sponsored by The New York Times. His essay, titled “How I Learned to Break Out of My Shell: An Autistic Boy’s Perspective on Communication,” was selected as one of 13 runners-up out of 11,000 entries.
“This is pretty amazing for a kid who wasn’t communicating at all not that long ago,” Wechsler said. “This is a communication break through.”
The subject of Max’s essay is fears he had before he could spell and communicate with his family. He expressed worry that he would be sent to an institution and that no one would ever know what was going on inside his head.
“Before this year, I was locked inside,” Max wrote in his essay. “I couldn’t express myself at all. I didn’t participate in my own life. I couldn’t articulate any preferences on a restaurant menu. I couldn’t share my sense of humor with the world. I couldn’t tell anyone that I suffered from my silence.”
Wechsler said she is amazed at how a new world has opened for their family.
She added that her son was bothered by how autism had kept his anxieties locked inside until they made the breakthrough with the letter board.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “I can’t take that away from him, but I can help manage it and meet his goals. We hope he can change the world’s perspective on autism and widen the definitions.”
During a recent interview, Max expressed his sadness about his grandmother’s death, which occurred just days earlier.
“I’m really sorry about your mom,” he told his mother through the letter board.
Max told the Times-Mirror during the interview that he enjoys talking about autism and he has plans to go to college to become a writer and a scientist.
He said he wants everyone to know that he is smart and that he is not intellectually disabled.
While many of Max’s sometimes destructive behaviors have not changed, his ability to communicate with his family has opened up new opportunities and they are hopeful that with his new-found communication skills he will soon turn a corner.
Max’s parents have been working with him to catch up on what he has missed in class work. Wechsler said they want to change the world and people’s understanding of what it means to be non-speaking, which is how Max prefers to be described.
“He is very verbal. He can type out humongous words, he has a great vocabulary, but his anxiety has often gotten in the way of that,” she said. “I have had to catch him up at home. Now he is learning Algebra and about World War II.”
Wechsler said she can’t help but think that there are other families who would benefit from using the letter board, and she hopes Max’s story will provide some inspiration for others.
She says it is sad they lost out on so many years of communication with their son, but they are proud of what he has achieved, especially with his award-winning essay.
“Now we can ask him what he wants for dinner or how he is feeling. He can crack jokes with us,” she said. “There have been so many disappointments over the years.”
“This is the first time we have seen something work,” she said.
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