The easy bond of swim teacher and autistic boy inspires a tale to buoy souls

By Christina Hernandez

When Michele Iaollonardi heard about the half-priced swimming lessons for children with autism, she was skeptical they would work for her son.

Jackson, who was 3 at the time and in the early stages of his autism diagnosis was a "disaster" said his mother, 34, in a recent interview at her Hauppauge home.

Jackson had yet to say his first word, and didn't interact with other children and cried in unfamiliar settings. He was receiving 40 hours of therapy a week, yet Iaollonardi said her son was still severely impaired.

But ever hopeful Iaollonardi said she enrolled Jackson in six, half-hour one-on-one swim classes at Saf-T-Swim in Bohemia. "I'm never going to see what happens if I don't do it," she said.

What happened was a surprising but too brief experience for Jackson, a connection that inspired Iaollonardi to write a story for the most recent book in the motivational series "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

She expected the instructor would be a seasoned autism specialist, or at least someone who was trained to work with children with special needs.

Instead, when she arrived for Jackson's first lesson in the fall of 2004, she met John Karl; a Stony Brook University freshman from Hauppauge with no special needs training. "Oh my God," Iaollonardi remembers saying. "This is a mistake."

She explained Jackson's autism to Karl, 18, who she said smiled broadly and reassured her. And to Iaollonardi's great surprise, Jackson didn't cry in the arms of the stranger. "He was happy," Iaollonardi said.

Over the next several months- Iaollonardi and her husband, Ralph, extended their son's lessons- Jackson learned to jump in the pool, kick his legs and close his mouth underwater. He became stronger, more confident, and more comfortable around children, his mother said.

"That was the only half-hour of his week when he was just like everyone else," she said.

Her son's connection with Karl was stunning, Iaollonardi said, at a time when even she and her husband had difficulty finding mutual enjoyment with Jackson,

Iaollonardi attributed their easy bond to Karl's natural way of playing with Jackson. "People don't know how to act around kids with disabilities," she said "and he didn't have that."

But after nine months of weekly sessions, the special connection came to an abrupt end.

On a Tuesday in May 2005, a Saf-T-Swim staff member called to cancel that week's lesson. Karl, who had been in a car accident over the weekend, was on life support.

He died that night.

Newsday reported that the accident occurred when Karl lost control of his 2000 Chevy Cavalier while changing lanes on the William Floyd Parkway. Police said his car slid along a guardrail and hit a steel pole. A passenger was also killed.

"We were just shocked," Iaollonardi said.

Iaollonardi, who regularly contributes to an autism-related magazine, decided to put her emotions on paper. She wrote a short story about Jackson's too-brief connection with Karl and submitted it to the editors of "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

The story was chosen from 5,000 submissions for inclusion in "Chicken Soup for the Soul: Children with Special Needs."

Heather McNamara, co-author of the book, which was released last month, said the originality and emotional impact of 'Swimming with John' made it one of the 94 stories selected.

"To find someone in the community who looked beyond his disability, and found the boy inside," she said, "it connected with a lot of the readers."

Approximately one in 150 children has an autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability characterized by impaired social interaction and communication.

Experts said a quick and close bond like Jackson and Karl's is relatively rare for a child with severe autism.

"Making social connections is probably the hardest part of the disorder to fix…because it's something for most people that come intuitively," said Phillip Eisenberg, a neurophysiologist at the Cody Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities at Stony Brook University Medical Center.

Jim Ball, co-chair of the panel of professional advisers for the Maryland-based Autism Society of America, said the sensory activity of swimming might have made Jackson more open to a relationship with Karl.

"It gets the kid to be a little bit more receptive at those times," Ball said "and they equate that with the person they're working with.

Lorna Karl said she knew her son John- she called him 'J.J'- worked with children with special needs, but she never realized the severity of some of the disabilities.

"I think the reason he and Jackson got along so well is because J.J. didn't see people as labels," she said. "There was no stigma there."

She described Iaollonardi's story as "a gift."

"One of the most wonderful things that happened to me since loosing J.J," Lorna Karl said, "was to meet Michele and her family."

Lorna Karl has become involved in autism advocacy, participating in an autism walk and campaigning for research. "His natural helper inspiration," she said of her son "it's just rippling out."

Jackson, now almost 6, no longer takes swimming lessons. "Anyone who was going to have him after that," Iaollonardi said, "It wasn't John."

But Jackson's skills have greatly improved, his mother said. He can say 20 understandable words and communicated his basic needs. His mother attributes his gains, in part, to his lessons with Karl. "He had such an impact on our lives," Iaollonardi said.

Although Jackson can't express his feelings for Karl, in his bedroom is a framed photo of their last session, taken the night before Karl's accident.

The enlarged camera phone image is grainy, but Iaollonardi is happy to have the remembrance. "I kind of like it cloudy," she said. "It's angelic."