Hard-fought victory over autism

At 26, Scott Rich is a gentle, scholarly young man whose glasses, dark hair and air of fascination lend him a certain Harry Potter quality. It’s hard to imagine the lifelong Rincon Valley resident ever acting up.

And it’s been a long time since he did. Back in the second and third grades, regular classrooms were just too busy and distracting for him to concentrate on what the teachers were trying to teach.

“They’d actually call me and I had to go get him,” recalled his mother, Esther Rich, as she shared a windowside couch with her eldest son at their airy home off Brush Creek Road. From the start, Esther and her husband, physician Stephen Rich, were up front with Scott about why school and friends and some other aspects of life were more difficult for him than for most other kids.

It was the autism. Scott was born with the complex neurological disorder that can cause him to shy away from other people and to feel overwhelmed by group dynamics and assignments.

The diagnosis — it came when he was 3 — wasn’t at all good news to Scott. But to this day he’s grateful to his folks for not trying to keep it from him out of fear he’d feel diminished or labeled.

“It’s something I don’t think parents should hide from their children,” he said. As a secret, he says, “it’s more damaging.”

Dealing with autism straight-on seems to have paid off. Scott’s parents advocated a proper level of special-education services for him — neither too subtle nor too aggressive and isolating — at Rincon Valley’s public schools. And from early on, Scott worked hard to overcome the autistic tendencies that would compel him to retreat into his own world and fixate on things of no importance.

“The issues don’t go away but you learn to live them, and even benefit from in some ways,” he said. He’s learned over the years to temper what could be an obsessive pursuit of perfection and to be satisfied with very good.

“We used to fear the time he would get a B,” his mom said.

Recently, Scott graduated from San Francisco State University, Phi Beta Kappa, with a bachelor’s degree in geography and a minor in special education. He’ll return to SFSU in the fall to pursue a master’s degree in special education — and he’ll work in the school’s Project Mosaic, which instructs teachers and other professionals to work with students challenged by any degree of autism.

Scott thrived as an undergraduate with minimal accomodation of his disorder. Because of his compulsion to over-plan his answers to tests, he needed and received more time to complete exams.

In high school, he required more help. As a member of Maria Carrillo High’s class of 2002, he had a shared aide who helped him to move along an assignment and not obsess on the details.

“Time management was very difficult,” Scott said. “I’d spend more time planning than doing.”

He counts high school, by and large, as a positive experience.

“It was alright on the whole,” he said. “There were some taunts here and there. I didn’t have a lot of friends; I guess I was OK with it.”

His need for special-ed assistance was greatest when he was in earliest grades of grammar school, a little boy discovering why he had trouble looking someone in the eye or staying calm and attentive in a bustling classroom. His mother recalled that he studied and behaved so well in a special-ed class in the first grade that school officials placed him in a traditional classroom the following year.

That didn’t work. “There was way too much going on” in the classroom for Scott, at age 7, to tolerate, his mother said. “It took a couple of years before things got normal again.”

Since then, Scott has gotten along well with less and less accomodation of his autism. He’s not sure what he wants to do once he earns his master’s degree but thinks it’s possible he’ll become a special-education teacher.

For the moment, the new graduate is kicking back and enjoying being back at home with his parents and his siblings, Jamie, who’s close to earning a bachelor’s degree in biology at UC Davis, and Matt, a senior at Maria Carrillo.

Scott has taken on autism and resolved to deal with it the best he can for all his life. That said, he has no interest in dwelling on it or allowing it do define him.

“I like to think that I’m an anybody who has some challenges,” he said. “And who doesn’t?”