AURORA, Ohio — For families all over the world, the diagnosis of autism in a child can be life-altering news.
Parents find themselves going to any extent to make it possible for their child to reach their full potential.
Count Melodie Reboira among them.
At the age of 3, her son Angelo was diagnosed with non-verbal, low-functioning autism. Though it was something his parents suspected, it didn’t lessen the blow.
“Fear, terror, what's going on,” Reboira said of the thoughts going through her mind. “I kind of surmised that it was potentially autism. So the hopelessness that sets in you can grip you hard.”
They would do their best for Angelo, following the curriculum available to him.
“He sat in a Special Education classroom doing pre-school work,” she said. “And I was taught to believe that he was cognitively incompetent.”
She knew there was more in Angelo but didn’t know how to bring it out.
In 2021, a cousin in Philadelphia gave her a key, a key that came in the form of a book that would unlock Angelo’s potential.
“Underestimated; An Autism Miracle” details a family’s journey through a program called “Spelling to Communicate.”
It teaches those with verbal challenges like Angelo’s the motor skills needed to point to letters to spell out words as an alternative way of communicating.
The only problem for the Reboiras?
“There were no practitioners in the area so I had to go to Tampa, Florida. So every four to six weeks I was traveling back and forth to Tampa, Florida and we even lived there for a little under two years. We just got back in December actually,” she said.
During their time there, she and Angelo learned the skills that allowed him to share the inner self no one saw.
“And so just by us reading that book we started our journey with Spelling to Communicate and shortly after we started our journey I was able to see that my son was highly intelligent, high IQ and so now we are doing an online high school curriculum and he's taking all honors classes and we use a Spelling to Communicate method for him to be able to access his education, his online curriculum,” she said.
As for his class load?
“AP U.S. History, AP Physics, AP English, some electives and stuff, Spanish II he just completed,” she said.
As for what’s next, well, we asked Angelo, now 18, to type that out for us.
“I am currently prepping for the ACT,” he patiently typed of the college admissions test. “After I pass my ACT test I will begin applying to colleges of interest. CSU is one on my list. I plan to go to Med School at Case.”
Working with Angelo and others now in Northeast Ohio on their Spelling to Communicate journey is Katy Custer, a long-time friend of the Reboiras.
They operate Mind over Body, Spelling to Communicate in Aurora.
“I saw Angelo grow up, so that when I saw he could communicate very differently then a few years ago on these boards it piqued my interest, and I had to know more, I could not look away,” Custer said. “There are a lot of people out there that are locked captive in their brain, in their mind, in their body and that they cannot communicate their thoughts and that makes me sad. So, I knew that there was a need and a few of us jumped on board and we ran with it, we knew that there was a need for the community.”
She said Angelo is great to work with. “He's brilliant, he's an excellent speller so he has great motor control but it still needs to be coached. So you know we've worked together we've coached starting from a three board where the letters are bigger, to the smaller board to where he needs a little more accuracy to his laminate board and then you saw him spell on the keyboard.”
With his newfound voice, Angelo patiently typed for us this message of his journey.
“I was labeled as low functioning before I could exhibit any other characteristics. It was the stigma I had to work against,” Angelo typed. “We nonspeaking people are marginalized on the grounds that we can't speak. I am one voice to be heard.”
