Wow!
Firstly I think it's great you are asking these questions.
Secondly the quality of answers is fantastic. I applaud the honesty, kindness and consideration the people on this site show. Your all wonderful and I am so glad I found this site.
My son hasn't 'got his diagnosis' yet but I've been warned that it will be so and I am learning so much for all your experiences.

Re school. I did a little teacher training, including a prac with an autistic boy.
What I learned doesn't exclusively apply to Autism but is more general. As parents we need to be involved as much as possible with the education of our children. Monitor your childs progress, spend as much time in the classroom as you can (even if it's just in the morning) you can learn alot by observation. A good school is a happy school, the principal is happy, the office workers are and so are the teachers, they are concerned with your child and you can feel this, it is very noticable.
If you are ok with religious schools they can be great for inclusive support, fostering an environment of caring amoungst the children. This should be evident. Do the children smile at you while you wait in the office? If everyone seems grumpy, or gruff run like the wind!
Get to know the teachers, they should be willing to share information about the curriculum with you and you can support at home. They should also be willing to go on professional development re ASD and if you hear of information sessions through your support groups pass it on.
I did some PD on Autism where they turned on 2 tapes of recorded voices reading text, and 1 music recording and asked us to listen to a particular recording so hard. They told us that is what autism is like. Very hard to focus in on and distinguish spoken voices. So verbal instructions wash over them. Visual instuctions are better. Like IKEA's guides to putting furniture together. Teachers will often not have these resources but can access them, and develop them and they are great for primary anyway when literacy is still developing.
Yesterday I printed off some pictures of people nodding and shaking heads to explain yes and no which my sone doesn't say. Ihad only shown him once and later that afternoon someone was insisting he say yes to something if he wanted it and he nodded! First time ever (hes 4)!
Anway I feel like I am rambling.
See ya

We checked out the school that Marcel would have attended. We even took our occupational therapist and speech
therapist along too. I was disappointed that the school wasnt fenced. My son will wander off. I told the principal
who was younger than me and nice enough that it was ridiculous to have a unfenced school, especially elementary.
My son cant talk, I dont want him alone with a man that I dont know and trust PERIOD. I am over protective and
PROUD OF IT. Unless & until we feel the school system is safe for my son he wont be attending PERIOD. I think
I intimidated the principal with my frankness lol. Anyway after our visit my husband said NO WAY, he's not going
to school, not at this point at least. We're doing okay =)

The quality of early intervention may make a difference. But it is difficult to predict what will work for your child.

Anyway, before you read the rest of my long comment here, I'd like to say that I've met many many people whose ASD children made amazing progress. I have seen ASD children develop language where there was none. I have seen whiny silent six year olds turn into kids who go to regular fifth grade. Just recently, a parent told me that their nine year old made the most progress ever after age 7. I've even heard of people in their teens suddenly talking.

Something that I hear almost on a daily basis is that no two children with autism are exactly alike. There are six categories of criteria for the diagnosis and, if I remember correctly, a child must score deficits in four of the six categories to be given the diagnosis. One of the things that makes autism so difficult is that their scores in these categories vary so greatly from child to child so that an educational plan that will work wonders for one child will not be so effective for another child. That is all part of the puzzle.

NIGHTMARES WITH SCHOOL DISTRICTS: That is also, in my opinion, part of what makes working with the school districts a nightmare. Very often, school districts will try to give you the minimum that they can. Most of the time they have a "one size fits all" program that is cost effective for them to run. They will tell you it is NOT a "one size fits all" because your child will receive 30 minutes of speech therapy per week at school. Often, they purposely try to give children low scores so that they can justify giving your child a program that resembles more of a daycare than a classroom. Even if you fight the school district, it takes forever to get some of what you want and sometimes you lose big. It is an expensive battle that NEVER ENDS.

APATHETIC ABA COMPANIES: This problem is not just in public schools. You can run into problems with therapy companies as well. Even if your case supervisor is wonderful and tries to provide a program that you approve of, there is also chance that you will get Cruella de Ville will who coldly ignore your questions and concerns and implement a program of tasks that your son could do a year ago or that your son does not respond to at all. (That way their therapists will have an easy time and they can show PROGRESS or hopelessness). They often send out inexperienced new hires who did not have the three cups of coffee that they should have before showing up on your doorstep. Some of these companies are better than others and people are only human.

THE FUN SIDE OF SCHOOL and THERAPY: My son really enjoys school and he wants to do some of his therapy activities in his leisure time. He likes the routine of school and he loves the fun and messy art projects and getting to play outside on the playground. He lives for the bus/shuttle to pick him up to take him to school.

THE SANITY SAVING PART FOR MOM: The time a child is away at school can be very precious to parents. It's the practical side of life. You must be able to think clearly to write out bills and do a bit of grocery shopping, get your hair cut, run every errand that would be 10 times more difficult if you had to bring your child along. And this time is also a time to rest or work on activities to do with your child for the rest of the day.

PICKING UP YOUR MARBLES AND GOING HOME: Some parents give up with the school district. They find a way to somehow pay for private arrangements such as one mom I know who hired a retired teacher/therapist to work with her child for 25 hours a week. Some parents choose to home school. (God bless them, those parents need a lot of respite time).

Every child needs exposed to a form of education or school. But these boys are not your son. They are not every ASD child. It is possible some children will degress, others will progress. You cannot protect these children forever from the outside world, and they are capable of learning, just in different ways than the "norm" Even if all they really learn is how to calm themselves down in social situations.

My son tested at 18 months over all in development when he started preschool last February. In May they did an IQ test for a state waiver I was trying to get for him. There was so much growth that it blew us away. Not every child is my son, but I think that with the proper school environments, and parent activity school is a good thing.

There are so many other factors you may not see. Did the parents stop working as hard on home routines, were the children placed in a daycare (or a different) due to schedule changes, was there a change or removal of outside therapy services?

I really love my son's teacher. Last spring he spent alot of time doing individual work, and getting one-on-one encouragement and praise. He basically started learning the things on his own rather than like normal children by a group of kids all being taught the same thing. He had an aide to help keep him on track. Now he is doing so much better, but in the same class. And he is a completely different boy. I have been told he is still doing group activity rather than being secluded.

I think unless the child is very low functioning, they should be exposed to a school of some sort. Even if it is just a teacher coming into the home and working with them at first. Because they will always have outside world pressures they need to learn how to process. They need to learn things will be expected out of them. I want to say we can protect our children forever, but in truth we cannot. I could keep Michael home and secluded but I want him to have skills to go out and have a life of his own. And I see school as a way of teaching some of those social skills he lacks.

My main suggestion is, the parents have to stay on track. If they see their child regressing, they need to discuss it with everybody who interacts with the child, and needs to point out what the cause(es) and fix it. If my child started slipping through the cracks, I would be cracking some heads until it is fixed. There is always an alternative somewhere. But our little people deserve to be given all the chances they lost to their ASD. In today's age of better understanding, our kids can do more than be destined for a group home or institutionalized.

Maybe I make sense, maybe I do not...

I'm a strong believer in educating all people to know themselves well so that, later on in their lives, they can devise their own "solutions" to their disability issues. An early version of ABA/IBI is essentially the only formal treatment (outside of the school's special education program) that my son received. It, therefore, is the only treatment than can be credited with his nearly full recovery (which took 17 years to achieve so far). The interaction through therapy taught us all skills that we (his parents) call upon to help him learn, and I am still calling upon those same techniques and skills today to continually build a better relations with my, now adult, son. He uses these same skills every day to help him de-stress and calm himself when life throws him unexpected turns. He needs these additional skills, because he still experiences those unexpected turns as an person with autism. For example, he still cannot filter background noise (a sensory issue common in autism), but he can relax himself and "tolerate" the distraction for a period of time. He misunderstands words and language and still takes things too literally, but he now knows how to use his own internal "dictionary" to help him decipher ambiguous phrases and even puns. Just tonight as he turned down his second helping of pork chops, he quipped "I really don't need to "pig out" on pork." An intentional pun is a rare thing for him, but not something he is incapable of doing.

I think there is a tendency today to believe the ABA/IBI is something that is "done to" a child that is supposed to "cure" the child so that the parents can "take over" "normal parenting" after the cure has taken place. ABA/IBI is something that the family needs to participate in so that everyone can utilize the parts of the therapy that, over time, were "discovered" as being helpful. The earlier this learning process is started for everyone, the better. So, yes, I believe in early educational intervention in whatever form that "works" for your individual child.

I also want, though, to address another statement. There is also a myth that runs rampant that people with autism are incapable of showing normal emotion. I'm glad you used the term "showing emotion," but some people expand this label into a belief that "people with autism don't have normal emotions." This is a blatant lie. People with autism express emotions "normally"; that is, matched to the circumstances THEY are experiencing. We are not experiencing the same thing. Our sensory perceptions are all different and autism can expand these differences until the "communication gap" can seem to be almost insurmountable.

People with autism are frequently "logo'd" as a puzzle piece, but for every individual one of them that we "puzzle" over - they must "puzzle" over tens, hundreds, thousands millions of individual US's. Their task is the harder of the two, is it?