Dachel Media Review: Programming is Expensive, What to Do?
By Anne Dachel
Read Anne's commentary and view the links after the jump. The Dachel Media Update is sponsored by Lee Silsby Compounding Pharmacy and their OurKidsASD brand.
May 7, 2014, Jackson (MS) Clarion Ledger: Rankin Co. School District abolishes autism program; parents angry
May 7, 2014, PublicNewsService.org: NV Lawmakers Asked to Increase Funding for Autism Treatment
May 7, 2014, TheStir.CafeMom,com: A Mom of 3 on Why She Doesn't Vaccinate Her Kids
May 5, 2014, WUSA 9, Washington, DC: Arlington autism program may be cut
The Rankin County School District will abolish a key component of its autism program next school year despite protests from parents who say their children have thrived in the specialized environment.
Parents were told this week the two K-6 autism classrooms at the district's Oakdale Elementary School will close and their children will be moved into self-contained settings or transferred to institutions.
The announcements were made individually, at special education meetings scheduled with each set of parents, and came as a complete surprise to everyone.
Within the next few years these stories will be changing. We'll be hearing about YOUNG ADULTS WITH AUTISM IN MISSISSIPPI WITH NO PLACE TO GO AND NO MONEY TO PAY FOR THEM. Will anyone be asking why by then? "The rate of autism has skyrocketed 381 percent in Mississippi in the past nine years, according to data from the state Department of Education."
Everyone is so accepting of this.
Nevada lawmakers are being asked to increase funding to help treat thousands of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders.
Jan Crandy, chairwoman of the Nevada Commission on Autism Spectrum Disorders, is among those addressing the Interim Legislative Committee on Health Care today in Las Vegas. More funding is needed, she said, because the state is treating fewer than 300 children with autism when there are thousands more who need help.
It's taken years for the people to include the environment as a given. "The environment" will remain the BIG UNKNOWN. It could be lots of things---too many to know for sure. (EXCEPT IT'LL NEVER BE VACCINES.)
There's no comment section here or I'd ask why, if the numbers are really increasing, no one is talking about STOPPING AUTISM. Why is our only recourse to provide treatment for those always here? How long can we continue to sit on our hands, helplessly?
Based on the past increases, the autism rate is predicted to be one in every two children by 2025.
It would be nice if people wanted to protect children from developing autism; here the fear is what autism will eventually cost when these children are adults.
Someone should tell these people that there's no real problem. Autism has always been here like this, we just called it something else.
Way back in 1998, well before Jenny McCarthy took center stage as the anti-vaccine (now "pro-vaccine") mom in the media, a mom in Tampa, Florida, named Sarah Pope "opted out" of vaccinating her first child. A decade and a half later, the author of the site The Healthy Home Economist admits that as a member of a family of doctors and nurses (both her father and brother are doctors of internal medicine, and her mother-in-law is an RN), "it took a lot" for her to reach a conclusion at odds with what she was raised to believe. Nonetheless, to this day, she says she's still "very happy" with her decision not to vaccinate all three of her children, who are now 15, 12, and 9 years old.
Sarah talked to The Stir about how she arrived at what some see as a controversial decision, what she's experienced as a result, and what she has to say to her opposition.
What led to your decision not to vaccinate?
It was a very thoughtful, conscious decision. I didn't do it out of fear. When I decided not to vaccinate, it was basic common sense. Autism wasn't really the hot button like it is now. Forget autism. It goes so far beyond that. That wasn't even on my radar. To me, if you dig into it, it's so obvious not to vaccinate. When I was pregnant, a friend of mine handed me a book about the DPT vaccine called A Shot in the Dark by Harris L. Coulter and Barbara Loe Fisher. I read that book, and it gave me just enough information to go, "Wait a minute ... there's a whole other side of the story here that I'm not even exposing myself to. I need to dig in here, and I need to research further." So I went down the rabbit hole, and I was like, "Wow, there is a lot of stuff here that is not being reported, and that is not being divulged to parents in pediatricians' offices." And it concerned me.
Wonderful to see such a smart mom. I posted comments.
In 2010, Arlington County Public Schools launched the Autism Program for middle school students that parents rave about.
"Practically, universally, the parents think it's a breath of fresh air," so much better than the way it used to be, with only teachers who were not trained or didn't understand the behavioral differences that come with autism, said Paley.
The program has five teachers providing two separate classes on social skills and instructional studies for the students with autism. It also currently has 12 assistants who float between mainstream classes to provide additional support when needed.
The new plan could cut seven of those 12 positions and save $271,000. Paley and other parents say it would make harder for their students to participate in regular classrooms with their peers who are not in special education.
If anyone thinks autism costs TOO MUCH now, wait until we have to pay for the adults. The Dachel Media Update is sponsored by Lee Silsby Compounding Pharmacy and their OurKidsASD brand. Lee Silsby Compounding Pharmacy is one of the largest and most respected compounding pharmacies in the country. They use only the finest quality chemicals and equipment to prepare our patients’ compounded medications and nutritional supplements. Customizing medication and nutritional supplements for our customers allows them to achieve their unique health goals.
Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism and author of The Big Autism Cover-Up: How and Why the Media Is Lying to the American Public, which goes on sale this Fall from Skyhorse Publishing.
I went to an IEP meeting Tuesday. My daughter could not handle being in the typical classes last fall, overwhelmed by language she couldn't understand and couldn't use. They put her in the self-contained classroom, and she only continued in the typical Spanish 1A class, where she's done very well, getting good grades on quizzes and tests without any assistance, because the language is simple, albeit in Spanish. She has been doing PLATO online classes in the four core subjects, seventh grade level, and her teacher just said Tuesday that she's failed all the tests in it. I looked at it, and it's much, much too hard for her, the website said it's "challenging" even for typical students, and that was the truth. She's in four typical seventh grade classes, with work dealing with nucleopeptides and mitochondria and details of cellular fission. Apparently no one has been keeping up with whether she understood the assignments at all, and she hasn't. On her IEP it just says she has "social anxiety," which was why she had to be taken out of typical classes. I said she has a language disorder because her brain was damaged, that it goes way beyond social anxiety. I said if they were forced to attend classes at a middle school in Saudi Arabia, not knowing much Arabic, they'd feel anxious, bored, inferior, and overwhelmed too. The county case manager said last September that he had been told she was the lowest verbal student in the autistic class. And yet they have insisted on saying she's normal verbally and can perform in the typical classes, even though she asked me last week what the word "necessary" meant. Can't say anything in a sentence using a dependent clause, or the conditional tense, or any perfect tense.
They are hanging on for all they are worth to the theory that autism is only a social, anxiety disorder, not a language disorder and developmental disability, I assume because, despite my many suggestions as to positive things they could do, they don't want to do anything that requires individual attention or original thinking. So they just have her sit there day after day, hour after hour, looking at PLATO online coursework that she can understand very little of. The teacher doesn't know how to grade her, as the special ed students just get passed right on through, but he's still supposed to grade them based on something, but, because he didn't want to point out to anyone that the PLATO idea just wasn't any good, Cecily has learned nothing and they are quite in a quandary trying to figure out how to assign a grade for work that was incomprehensible to her, and yet still pass her. The idea that she has a normal IQ and yet can understand very little English is just a concept that they are completely unable to conceptualize. If she has a normal IQ, she has to understand English after having lived here for fourteen years. There is no middle ground, no understanding of what it means to have had vaccine brain damage that cut off circulation to her brain for long enough to do severe damage to the language and social centers of her brain, but left other areas intact.
I really can't believe it: a total insistence that she's in the normal range, and yet has never conversed with anyone about anything, cannot write even a paragraph about anything, cannot understand much of what's going on around her, but, presumably to save money, they are going to go to their graves insisting that she can do grade-level work. Despite her meltdowns in class last fall, they are already talking about putting her back in the regular classes. I said no way, only for Spanish, computer skills, and cooking, that don't require much language.
Laziness, stinginess, dishonesty, I assume that that is what awaits most of our children as no one is going to want to even attempt to meet their needs. And this is one of the results of the shills' work, having succeeded in convincing (nearly) everyone that autism is just an interesting difference, not even a disability. And this embrace of neurodifference has made my daughter's life very unhappy.
Posted by: cia parker | May 08, 2014 at 11:36 PM
"The rate of autism has skyrocketed 381 percent in Mississippi in the past nine years, according to data from the state Department of Education."
Isn't Mississippi one of only two states that only allow medical reasons for vaccine exemptions?
Posted by: Greg | May 08, 2014 at 09:33 PM
I find the Jackson story alarming. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought that unless children require continuous skilled nursing care or if they are too medically fragile to attend, that they are not excluded from public school. Schools are supposed to go to great lengths to meet the needs of all children in the community. When I read that this town is closing down it's autism program in favor of sending those elementary students with autism to institutions (!) or "self-contained settings" (whatever that means but it doesn't sound like a place I'd want to spend my childhood), my impression is that these children are deliberately being removed from society, and from public view. Am I overreacting in seeing a red flag here?
Posted by: Linda | May 08, 2014 at 07:06 PM