Plans to construct a new 27,000 school for autistic children in Milford, Connecticut, have been put on hold after Planning and Zoning Board members questioned the design and material of the proposed school, today’s New Haven Register reports:

PZB Chairwoman Jean Cervin said the board specifically did not like the “rectangular box” appearance of the proposed school, and the metal roof. She also said the playscape is proposed for the front yard, and some members felt it was too close to the road, and should be placed at the rear of the site.

Cervin said PZB members do not object to the proposed 30,000-square-foot school, which includes a gymnasium.

“They do a very necessary piece of education for autistic children,” Cervin said.

Suzanne Letso, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Connecticut Center for Child Development, is concerned about the proposed changes increasing the price of building the school. Currently, the school has 45 students in one building and rents additional space for seven students from a church. Fundraising for the new school has been going on for seven years.

Notably, what’s missing from the discussion is what sort of design and classroom environment would be best for autistic students, but since when has that ever been the priority…….

Connecticut’s Pilot Program For Autistic Adults which “adults of normal intelligence with diagnoses on what is called the autism spectrum” is in danger due to budget cuts. Today’s New Haven Register reports that Governor M. Jodi Rell has ordered all state government agencies to submit proposals that will cut up to 10 percent from their upcoming budgets. Prior to the program’s inception in 2006 (with $1 million from the state), no services were provided to autistic adults of normal intelligence (adults with diagnoses of both autism and mental retardation did receive services). The program received an additional $500,000 in July 2008 and is financed through June 2009. Currently, 52 people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome in in the greater New Haven and Hartford areas are served under the progam and it’s changed their lives, as the New Haven Register reports:

After her son became too old for the public school system, Eileen Horan paid for him to attend a private vocational school for two years, but the cost became unbearable and Paul had to leave. He spent his days alone in his apartment, unable to find a job. He had no friends and nothing to do.

“When he would get bored, he’d get depressed. And then he’d get meltdowns — just thinking all bad things,” Eileen said. She said it’s common for individuals with Asperger’s syndrome or autism to have “meltdowns,” where they have suicidal thoughts or urges to hurt themselves.

As the sole provider for Paul, Eileen wasn’t able to get away, even for a weekend visit to her daughter’s home out of state.

“My whole time was just spent helping Paul shop and cook. It was just really, really rough going,” she said.

According Rosenwald, nine out of 10 adults on the autism spectrum are unemployed or underemployed. Most live with their families, “if they’re fortunate enough to have families that will keep them.” When parents get too old to care for them or die, they often end up in institutions or on the streets.

Living on the streets, autistic adults, whom Rosenwald characterized as “very gullible and very much the victim,” are often sexually abused.

“We hear one horrendous story after another,” Rosenwald said.

When living at home, autistic adults often spend their days home alone watching television and getting “seriously depressed.” This year, three young adults who belonged to the Autism Spectrum Resource Center committed suicide.

At last Friday’s IACC meeting, I heard Kathy Reddington, Autism Coordinator for the Division of Autism Spectrum Services, speak. She noted the impending budget cuts and also that they’d keep trying to do what they can.

It’s been reported that the use of restraints has increased in public schools. The October 24th New Britain Herald describes symptoms of something like post-tramatic stress in two autistic students who were allegedly abused by a special education teacher:

Arelis Kinard, a parent of the one of the students involved, said her 7-year-old son is nonverbal but has been having behavioral problems that may be attributed to abuse. “I’m angry, I’m angry at the school, I’m angry at the system,” she said during an often tearful press conference on the steps of New Britain Superior Court.

Parent Alberta Marin said her son now fears going to bed after being locked in a dark closet. “It’s a struggle every day when you have a child with autism,” Marin said. “Every day is different, and one morning he can wake up and be sensitive to something - even brushing his teeth can be a problem. He doesn’t want to sleep alone anymore, he wants me to keep the TV on all night. I can tell there’s something in his head that I can’t find out.”

Add “autistic people don’t feel pain” to the list of autism myths that just won’t go away.

Sunday night, it happened that we drove past Charlie’s old school.

I don’t mean the elementary school he attended last year before moving up to middle school and simply loved. The main part of that school was an old stone building that had been added onto; the school was located on a quiet street with a bakery, convenience store, post office, hair cutting salon, and a firehouse nearby. Prior to that Charlie was briefly at another, equally pleasant, elementary school in our town and, prior to that, he was at a very small private autism school, located inside a very large private day school. He was happy there, but the school closed after he’d been a student there for a few months.

Prior to that, Charlie attended the same public elementary school in a different town in New Jersey for two years, and that was the school was chanced to pass by Sunday night. And without realizing what was going on, I found my eyes watering and a big lump in my throat as Jim drove past.

That school wasn’t the neighborhood school that Charlie would have attended if he hadn’t had to go to a special autism classroom, but it wasn’t far from our house at all, on the other side of the town. Charlie had the same teacher—a compassionate and kind-hearted young woman—for two years and a rotating group of aides. The first year, he started attending music class with the kids his age and we started talking about library and art; we started talking about him potentially attending class with kids his age, with an aide. I became a very active member of the PTA, writing the monthly newsletter, volunteering on numerous committees, and becoming the co-president in Charlie’s second year.

But on and off in the first year, and definitely by the beginning of the second year, Charlie was struggling. There were more meetings with the teacher, phone calls from the school nurse about “bumping” his head, me on the phone with an ABA consultant, Jim on the phone with a lawyer. By February of 2005—after an old friend, Charlie’s first speech therapist, observed him and told us that he couldn’t stay in his classroom—we began the search for a new school for Charlie.

We  began a tense back and forth with the school district about finding another school placement for Charlie. For months the district said no, our setting is appropriate; after a few more months, they offered us a placement at a center and we said no, that wasn’t what Charlie needed. Another placement was 45 minutes away south down the Garden State Parkway and Jim and I said no to that, too. After several more months, in November of 2005, we took Charlie out of his classroom in our old town and that was probably the last time he ever saw that school. He went to the above-noted private school in mid December and then, after it closed in June of 2006, we moved to another town where Charlie’s been going to school ever since.

Charlie now goes to school at the same middle school where every child in our town does. He rides a school bus with the other boys in his class and is on the bus for less than a half-hour. Many of the kids who we see when we go swimming at the YMCA are the kids he passes in the hallways. Charlie goes to school in this town, is part of the town, is close to home.

Bringing Special-Needs Schools Close to Home is the title of an article in the October 12th New York Times. The article focuses specifically on the creation of in-state residential schools for older students with “high-functioning autism”; many of these students had previously been sent to schools in Connecticut, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Ohio. Westbrook Preparatory School cost $2.5 million and was “founded after intense lobbying by parents.” It can cost some $200,000 a year to pay for a student in a residential out-of-state placement.

The new school, to serve 24 middle and high school students with average or above-average intelligence but in need of significant emotional and social support, is part of a statewide push to bring special education students back from out-of-state private schools by creating publicly financed alternatives closer to home.

Since 2005, out-of-state placements by school districts and social service agencies have dropped to fewer than 650 from more than 1,200, even as the number of special education students has risen slightly to 410,000, or 12 percent of the total student population. Besides Westbrook Prep, a half dozen New York City schools for the disabled are planning to add residential programs in the next few years.

“New York is a great state. Why should our children have to be sent out of state for services?” said Lester Kaufman, executive vice president of Birch Family Services, a nonprofit agency that runs a network of schools for students with special needs, which is starting a residential program for 12 high school students in Flushing, Queens, next year. “We should be able to create those services locally where the families and children live, and this is exactly what this program is about.”

Definitely yes about having schools and services “locally where the families and children live.” The New York Times articles does not, though, explain precisely why the students mentioned are living in residential placements; one student is described as “commuting” to a school in Connecticut, though he only returns home on the weekends when his mother makes the trip to bring him home to Long Island. The article does say that it’s hoped that, with the students attending schools in New York, they might eventually be able to attend schools with their peers.

Certainly I’m glad that Charlie can go to school in our town; that there’s a place for him here, and that I can tuck him into bed each note and make sure his favorite things are beside his bed, and the three fleece blankets (two of which he’s had since he was a baby) piled up just so, and carefully folded, just the way he likes.

A special education teacher in New Britain, Connecticut, is still teaching and on the school district’s payroll, the October 11th Hartford Courant reports. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Michelle Campbell on Thursday; she was released after posting $5000 bail. Campbell taught a special education class with ten autistic students at the Chamberlain School and is accused of slapping a child and splashing water into the face of another; the children are boys ages 5 to 7. The incident occurred last May and campaign will be arraigned October 23rd on three counts of risk of injury to a minor and four counts of cruelty to persons. Campbell’s co-workers reported the abuse.

This is hardly the first time I’ve written charges of abuse by school personnel or other staff to autistic individuals and it’s hardly a fair portrait of all that most aides, teachers and others do.

We have to figure out how to do better.

Send students to out-of-district private school placements or bite the bullet and devote funds to creating in-district educational programs that can truly meet a student’s needs? The school district in Meriden, Connecticut, is weighing both options, as a September 27th Record-Journal article details. Out of a total of over 1,300 special education students, 207 Meriden students are outplaced.

My son has been primarily in in-district public school programs. These have varied greatly in quality and in the training of staff. When Charlie was 7, the school district we then lived in just did not have the right program for him and for several months, Charlie floundered (and his behavior problems increased and escalated) until we took him out of school in the district in November of 2005. He went to a private autism school for several months and then we moved to a different school district, which has gone out of its way to develop an extensive in-district program (parents had demanded it). Teachers, therapists, and instructors are well-trained and supported. Charlie is in a self-contained classroom but he is in the middle school for my town and has limited, regular, interactions with the school community.

Still, there are some students who are in out-of-district placements and who are homeschooled—what works for one child and family will not necessarily be the right thing for all.

And not that I want to, but we would move again if we have to.

Gerald Guay, who formerly worked in a Bloomfield (CT) state-run group home for mentally disabled people, was banned from working in the health care industry after pleading guilty to negligent cruelty to a person, the August 11th Hartford Courant reports. Guay tormented and abused 38-year-old Christopher Stockton, who has severe autism, developmental disabilities, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and does not speak. Stockton’s mother, Alice Stockton, suspected the abuse more than two years ago when her son started to have seizures, around the time that Guay started to work in the home:

Alice Stockton was told [by Connecticut's Department of Developmental Disabilities] there was nothing that could be done because there was no proof of abuse, according to the affidavit. Eventually she began to periodically take an audio recording what was happening in the room that her son had to himself, according to the affidavit.

On Dec. 18, 2007, Alice Stockton activated the recorder in his room, but did not immediately listen to what transpired. Three days later, she picked up her son and brought him to her home in Windsor for the weekend. When she tried to brush his teeth, she noticed a laceration and a hematoma on the inside of his mouth, she told police.

On Dec. 23, Alice Stockton listened to the recording and heard Guay entering her son’s room shortly after she left. In the recording, Guay is heard swearing at Christopher Stockton and threatening to “bash his head in” several times, according to the affidavit.

According to the affidavit, the recording reveals several incidents over the course of an hour including two revolving around the flushing of a toilet by Christopher Stockton, who also suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder.

On the recording Guay can be heard, in an expletive-filled tirade, threatening to beat Christopher Stockton and make him eat the toilet if he doesn’t stop flushing it, according to the affidavit.

Guay was given five-year suspended prison sentence, three years’ probation and 100 hours of community service. He has worked with disabled individuals for 14 years.