Up, Up and Away: Autism in Boston Schools
By F Edward Yazbak MD
The title of a report in the “Metro” section of the Boston Globe on May 29, 2013 was hard to miss:
"Boston schools seek $6m more for special ed
Rise in students with autism helps prompt increase"
“An increase in students being diagnosed with autism or other disabilities is driving up special education spending in Boston, prompting the School Department to request $6 million in supplemental funding.
The additional money is needed so the School Department can end the fiscal year in June with a balanced budget. The School Committee is scheduled to vote on the request at its June 5 meeting…
By April, 747 students with disabilities, including 158 on the autism spectrum, were enrolled in preschool, compared with 482 four years ago. …
Educating students with autism can be an intensive and expensive endeavor. The School Department limits preschool class sizes to no more than eight students with autism, and many of them also require working one-on-one with a behavioral specialist.
Nearly $5 million of the additional funding request would pay for behavioral specialists, most of whom are provided by private contractors. Over the next few years, in an effort to reduce costs, the School Department is planning to expand its staff of behavioral specialists.
Overall, 489 students across all grade levels this year are working with behavioral specialists, up from 205 last year…
School officials presented the spending request at last Wednesday’s School Committee meeting. None of the committee members raised concerns about approving the additional funding, an indication that passage is likely…” http://tinyurl.com/nk3eeou
***
The proposed 2014 Boston Public School (BPS) Budget will also contain a request for increased funding for several reasons that included:
The highest projected enrollment since 2005 of nearly 1,200 new students, “nearly half of whom have high-severity disabilities, reflecting a national trend.”
The allocation of “$30 million new dollars directly to schools through Weighted Student Funding.” http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/budget
The budget proposal includes the following under “Special Education”: “The FY14 budget increases the overall allocation for special education services by approximately $30 million. This allows us to serve an increasing number of students with disabilities in early grades while expanding high-quality programs in other grades – including two new inclusion schools and the planned future creation of an inclusion high school to create a K-12 pathway. We continue to closely examine our core spending obligations to better direct resources to serve students."
Boston is obviously not alone. The same proportion of students with autism and ASD is most likely evident nationwide and an equal strain on school budgets is undoubtedly being felt everywhere. The arrival of nearly half the new enrollees to US schools with “high-severity disabilities”, many of which are related to the autistic spectrum, is a tidal wave unlike any other.
Having served as a school physician in two school systems for 34 years, I can safely attest that we never had such a proportion of arriving special education (SPED) students in the past, many of whom requiring one-to-one attention.
An excellent discussion of Special Education Inclusion and the Federal Laws dealing with education of the disabled can be found at http://tinyurl.com/22m3dr7
For a general review of the “Weighted Student Funding” mentioned above, please see http://reason.org/files/wsf/overview.pdf
For a more focused and detailed review and analysis of “Weighted Student Funding” in the Boston Public Schools 2014 Budget, please see http://tinyurl.com/p5m85gf
Read the full post at Vaccination News.
Jeanette Bishop- I think you're pretty much on the money with your theory that a more draconian approach is preferrred as a way to try and deal with the reality that overall students are not doing as well. No more Kindergarten chick hatching experiences in favour of computerized teaching tools? Yuk!
Posted by: Jen | June 11, 2013 at 02:25 PM
To Edward Yazbak on a previous subject we discussed :
My feeling is the immigrant Somalian (Minneapolis and Sweden) and Ugandan (Germany) communities with the extraordinary high rates of autism which are reported to be 1 in 8 or greater even are surely ripe for a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study . And I think it might be an easy process to perform ?
My simple thinking goes like this , that when I was coerced into vaccinating my first child against my better judgement (I've always believed and listened to minority opinions - so the murmurings of mercury vaccine injury that had been whispered was entirely plausible to me , and unfortunately as it turned out for my eldest child ,it was all too true , vaccines do cause autism , there was & is no doubt. ) But my next action was significant , which was a total boycott of all vaccines for my second child who is perfectly neurotypical and I would suggest this pattern is the same in many families (including some of these immigrant families .)
So would these particular families be worthy of a study where after losing a child to the autism vortex , they then might boycott all vaccine , and subsequent children would be neurotypically healthy .And then because of their very high recorded rates of vaccine injury , the findings could quite clearly show a significant statistical anomaly which would incriminate the culprit (which of course we all know to be the vaccines .)
Posted by: White Rose | June 10, 2013 at 01:09 PM
I watched this teacher's resignation a couple of weeks back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH9vxq1iJVM
I'm not in the public school system, but I couldn't help wondering if such loss of innovation and more focus on rules and teaching to the test are further costs of our neurotoxic vaccine program. Not that these things are likely to be helping IMO, but when it seems like performance is going down overall with no explanation, perhaps more draconian approaches begin to seem necessary? Following the rules, no matter how unhelpful they are, becomes the best protection for some teachers and administrators when performance seems to be on the decline I would imagine.
I wonder if our schools generally came to understand environmentally and institutionally what is happening, if that would help foster a more free, teaching to the child approach in education?
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | June 10, 2013 at 11:50 AM
White Rose
I am sure also that greed and arrogance have a lot to do with it - setting people up for chronic illnesses which then end up being medicated. One of the most fabulous rackets that ever been devised in the history of the world, particularly since you can pretend to be philanthropic while doing it. Maybe there are people who dream of culling the population although I am inclined not to believe that is what's driving the industrial juggernaut.
Posted by: John Stone | June 10, 2013 at 10:34 AM
To John Stone :
I understand & fully accept your point , but does that public relations strategy you speak of , really explain the accelerated program of vaccinations per child in the US\UK plus also the proliferation of needless vaccines throughout the world eg. the flu vaccine which we know to be a total fraud ?
Posted by: White Rose | June 10, 2013 at 09:51 AM
Breaking news...
Oregon passes bill on vaccination education
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/10/oregon-passes-bill-on-vaccination-education/
Per photo, ONCE AGAIN, FOX HEALTH is still using a vaccine syringe with the ....damn AIR BUBBLES in it... which can cause a pulmonary embolism and sudden death.
Education is so important....
Posted by: cmo | June 10, 2013 at 08:55 AM
John of course they know, I also think that's why they don't do an accurate count each year for the rates due to it being linked to formulation changes in the vaccines.
Posted by: Victor Pavlovic | June 10, 2013 at 08:50 AM
Ed,
When will there be an end to this catastrophe? When will they stop pretending?
They know, of course, otherwise they could never have worked out the public relations strategy: instead of more neurological impairment being a bad thing, more recognition of it was good thing. Now, there's selling. The general public still look on duped, and heart-warmed by the benign and philanthropic intent of our masters. God help us all, our children and our grandchildren!
John
Posted by: John Stone | June 10, 2013 at 08:09 AM