Making school days happy days for children with autism spectrum disorders has become more of a reality, but these children still face academic challenges and fragile student-teacher-relationships. These three talks look at aspects of academic engagement--including relationships with teachers, task engagement, academic performance, and in-class attention--across the early childhood, middle childhood, and secondary school years for children with ASD. In the first paper, the author will present a model of successful transition to the early school years that hypothesizes school and teacher relationships as moderators of child outcome of success in literacy. In the second paper, the author addresses school engagement in minimally verbal children participating in a literacy task. The author of the third paper will address challenges of communication in the natural classroom setting, also with minimally verbal children, using PECS. In the fourth paper, the author will present data on the classroom engagement of secondary school students via public speaking and a virtual reality paradigm. The four research teams represented in this scientific panel utilize a variety of methodological approaches including single case design, within group parametric analyses and multi-level modeling. Discussion in each case will focus on implications for current or future interventions.