Posted on 01/31/2010 11:31:06 AM PST by Brugmansian
Amity Regional School District officials say it just doesn’t make sense: Why is the district being punished for having too many white autistic kids?
And it’s the federal government’s punishment that is raising tempers — cutting the crucial funding used to educate the autistic students.
It’s a thorny issue for all sides. When one racial group — black, white or otherwise — appears to be getting a disproportionate amount of special education funding, red flags go up at the federal Department of Education. But local educators said they are powerless to control the racial makeup of their community and who is diagnosed with autism, which is under the special education umbrella . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at nhregister.com ...
whitey don’t count, you see
Maybe this is another reason why the DOE should be disbanded and instead just send flex grant money to the STATES.
OMG!
Sickle Cell Anemia should be treated the same way, IMHO.
Far too many Black kids get that funding, it just is not fair!
Good. Most “autism” diagnoses are bullshit anyway. I live in CT, and when my son was in kindergarten more than half the boys in class were “autistic”. Total nonsense and often an excuse for lousy parenting, diet, or both.
Look, any diagnosis can be abused -—
But Autism is REAL and it is heartless and asinine to dismiss every case as you do.
Half the boys? CT? Yuppie moms too busy for the kids? Boys are either ADD, autisitic, homophobic, too aggressive, etc etc.
Michael Savage has a PhD in nutrition and his radio show is more about conservatism and politics but he goes off on nutrition, the drug industry, ADD and a lot of other nonsense often. I problem often with children is poor diets especially too much sugar and sugar is in every packaged food.
Young boys need to all be on Ritalin or some drug. It is such BS.
Some parents have to also work like dogs to stay aflaot because of the taxes used to provide illegals with endless freebies.
Yes! This is Exhibit #A. A well intentioned Federal law designed to prevent black kids from being dumped into special education classes when they had no handicap has backfired. The bureaucracy can't do a thing about it because it must follow the law. Locals could fix this problem in ten minutes. I bet it takes months and months for the Federal government to rectify the situation...if it ever does.
Congenital deafness is twice as likely in hispanics as whites. So is lack of English spoken in the home. Based on this assumption that racial breakdowns in education must be equal, are we to stick whites in ESL just to make it racially balanced?
There was a case a decade or so ago in the SF bay area. A black student, first or second grade, ended up in a ESL Mandarin Chinese class. His parents were dumbfounded. They had to go to the media to get him out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most cases of autism aren’tt found mostly in whites.The lastest studies point to the parents age as a big factor and knowing it is mostly whites who postpone having kids until into their 30’s or later....if the newest studies are true then most cases would probably be in whites.
well I will agree that I think the term is overused.
1 in 150 kids being autistic seems very high.
Racism and Stupidy show their ugly heads.
That reminds me of my neighbor whose children were enrolled in the Spanish ESL classes because the mom was of hispanic descent. The father was white, the whole family spoke English, no one spoke Spanish. They had lived their entire lives in the USA. She went to the school to take them out, but the school wouldn’t budge until she threatened to sue. This was the Fort Worth ISD.
If the kids were all black, cuting the funding would be “racist”.
It’s funny - whites are supposed to pay for the system they can’t use.....
Any theory of autism’s etiology must take into account its strong genetic basis while explaining its striking epidemiology. The apparent increase in the prevalence of autism over the last 20 years corresponds with increasing medical advice to avoid the sun, advice that has probably lowered vitamin D levels and would theoretically greatly lower activated vitamin D (calcitriol) levels in developing brains. Animal data has repeatedly shown that severe vitamin D deficiency during gestation dysregulates dozens of proteins involved in brain development and leads to rat pups with increased brain size and enlarged ventricles, abnormalities similar to those found in autistic children. Children with the Williams Syndrome, who can have greatly elevated calcitriol levels in early infancy, usually have phenotypes that are the opposite of autism. Children with vitamin D deficient rickets have several autistic markers that apparently disappear with high-dose vitamin D treatment. Estrogen and testosterone have very different effects on calcitriol’s metabolism, differences that may explain the striking male/female sex ratios in autism. Calcitriol down-regulates production of inflammatory cytokines in the brain, cytokines that have been associated with autism. Consumption of vitamin D containing fish during pregnancy reduces autistic symptoms in offspring. Autism is more common in areas of impaired UVB penetration such as poleward latitudes, urban areas, areas with high air pollution, and areas of high precipitation. Autism is more common in dark-skinned persons and severe maternal vitamin D deficiency is exceptionally common the dark-skinned. Conclusion: simple Gaussian distributions of the enzyme that activates neural calcitriol combined with widespread gestational and/or early childhood vitamin D deficiency may explain both the genetics and epidemiology of autism. If so, much of the disease is iatrogenic, brought on by medical advice to avoid the sun. Several types of studies could easily test the theory.
Don’t get me started... Fairfax County tried pulling that on my kids just because my wife mentioned that Mandarin was spoken at home. They didn’t care that the kids were fluent in that and English and didn’t need ESL. It’s all about the funding.
However, it is incredibly over-diagnosed. The apparent increase in the number of cases is due to a couple of factors that have nothing to do with medicine, nutrition, or vitamins, and everything to do with economics.
First of all, the school district gets extra $$$ for every kid who is diagnosed with a learning disability or needs "special education." They get still more money for every diagnosis of autism. So - just like the push to get kids into the ESL classes to get the extra money - there's a push to diagnose autism in order to access the funding.
In tandem with that, the diagnostic criteria for autism have expanded tremendously. 50 years ago, the kids were lumped into the category of 'mentally retarded' or sometimes 'childhood onset schizophrenia'. The diagnosis required very severe symptoms. When I was a young adult, back in the 70s, some friends of mine had a child who actually was autistic. He was completely mute, could not communicate, and spent his days staring at the wall or rocking back and forth in front of any source of noise or music. He is 100 percent non functional and will have to be institutionalized when his parents die.
These days, with the pressure to get the money, "autism", "autism spectrum disorder" or "Asperger's Syndrome" include kids that we used to describe as "geeky" or "a little odd". I'm pretty sure that as a tetchy, preoccupied ADD sort of kid, I would have had the diagnosis slapped on me faster than you could say "Special Education Funding". My son's teachers (no doubt fed up to here with him) tried to diagnose him as autistic. We refused the diagnosis, he's now in the U.S.M.C. and loving every minute of it. If we'd let his teachers railroad him into the special classes for autistic kids, that would have torpedoed his career before it ever started. He would probably have been living on SSI checks forever and a day.
When the powers that be say they're only trying to help you, usually they're not.
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