Has more info on special ed





I am writing (belatedly) to follow up John Loesing’s article of June 8 titled "Special Education Forces Hard Choices for Schools."


As a mother sending a daughter off to overcrowded A.E. Wright middle school next month, I share the frustration we all feel with anything that drains funds from our general education budget. However, as the mother of a preschool son who has autism, I feel strongly that targeting special education, and in particular the preschool services offered at Buttercup, is a disastrously bad idea. Here’s why.


First, we are in the midst of a massive autism cluster. Las Virgenes and Oak Park (also served by Buttercup) districts had fewer than 2,000 kids in grades K-1 combined last year http://data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest. Assuming our crop of 3-4 year-olds is also about 2,000 kids, then at the conventional incidence rate of 5-15 cases per 10,000, we should have 1 to 3 autistic kids total. At the newly increased rate of 1 per 500, we should have as many as 4. If we were Brick Township, New Jersey, where alarmed citizens called out the Centers of Disease Control to confirm and investigate their autism cluster (see last week’s Newsweek cover article or http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/programs/cddh/d/report.htm, we’d have 6 per 1,000, or 12 total.


In fact there were 20 children with autism enrolled at Buttercup last year, not counting those who were not yet diagnosed or in outside therapy or not enrolled for whatever reason(s). The less we help these kids today, the more impaired, dependent and expensive each one will be for the next 15 or 20 years they will spend in our school district.


Second, there is ample scientific evidence that Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy helps virtually every autistic child to improve. If intensive therapy is started before age 5, as many as half these kids can fully recover, meaning working at grade level in neighborhood schools without special support. Moving these kids out of special ed is an obvious win for us all, both in human and budgetary terms.


When it comes to preschoolers with autism, help delayed is help denied; even the best methods produce far less impressive results when offered too little or too late.


Finally, special ed is different from general ed only in its intensity, not in basic purpose and goals. Buttercup is not a charm school, nor a free tutoring service for the offspring of fretful and litigious parents.


In fact, the only legal goals of special ed are mainstreaming, integration and self-sufficiency; there’s nothing in the law about luxury or even excellence.


We owe all our children a free appropriate public education; that’s why we pool our tax dollars to pay for schools in the first place.


The notion of pitting special education kids against the "normal" kids is not only cruel but fiscally obtuse. As a community we should demand that our elected representatives vote to fully fund IDEA; we should demand our own investigation of what’s causing so much autism among our kids, and perhaps seek emergency tax relief to cope with it; and meanwhile we should increase, not decrease, our financial support for Buttercup.


Cathy Beier


Calabasas



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