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Good questions.

Interesting article here.

http://www.edutopia.org/autism-school

Whatever the cause, there is no doubt about autism’s impact on public schools. Administrators face growing pressure from vocal and sophisticated parents who insist on state-of-the-art instruction, highly trained teachers, staff-to-student ratios as low as 1 to 1, and extensive support services such as speech and occupational therapy. When districts don’t deliver the programs parents demand, or pay for private school alternatives, families are increasingly willing to fight in administrative hearings and court.

That makes ASD more than an educational challenge for many districts; it’s also a legal nightmare. “Autism is a leading problem on the radar now and a leading source of lawsuits,” reports Bryna Siegel, an adjunct child and adolescent psychiatry professor and director of the University of California at San Francisco’s Autism Clinic.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act guarantees “free appropriate” education to all disabled students. But the government has never fully funded the act, and “appropriate” can mean one thing to a parent determined to get the very best for a child but something else entirely to an administrator juggling limited resources for a seemingly unlimited number of special needs, including autism as well as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning difficulties, physical disabilities, and serious medical conditions (all of which are on the rise in public schools).

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Even merely adequate is expensive: A study by the Special Education Expenditure Project (conducted for the U.S. Department of Education) found that special classes, therapists, aides, transportation, and facilities for an autistic student cost an average of nearly $19,000 a year, or roughly triple the cost for a typical child. When districts go beyond adequate to establish intensive one-on-one programs or support a full array of speech, play, and occupational therapies, spending can skyrocket to $75,000 or more.

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Some parents, disappointed with their local offerings and unwilling or unable to send a child out of their district, upend their lives and move. After four disastrous years in Pennsylvania public schools, Rudy, the guide on About.com’s autism page, decided to teach her son herself. Last summer, the family moved to Massachusetts, which Rudy says has friendlier homeschool laws.

More often, parents pack up for a district they believe offers more than the one they’re in. Web forums buzz with opinions about specific schools and pleas from these searching nomads, often in a lingo that would baffle anyone unfamiliar with autism: For instance, a parent moving to New Jersey posted, “I am looking for small-group instructions with no aversives used, ABA-based, trained staff.”