Back in May, 5-year-old Alex Barton was voted out of his kindergarten class by his classmates. His teacher, Wendy Portillo, had asked the students to vote on whether they wanted Alex to remain. Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton, removed Alex from the school following this incident, which received a great deal of attention in the national media. Portillo has been suspended for a year without pay and is asking that her her case be reviewed by the state Division of Administrative Hearings. Alex is now being taught at home and Melissa Barton is requesting that the St. Lucie County School District pay for private school, psychological testing and counseling for him, as reported in today’s Palm Beach Post:

Barton filed a complaint with the district in late August seeking an administrative hearing. In the complaint, which she released to the media this week, Barton outlined the incident that occurred last May in Wendy Portillo’s kindergarten class.

The complaint also says that school officials failed to evaluate Alex for autism within the time frame specified by law - he was privately diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, after the incident - and didn’t establish an individual educational program as required by federal law.

Barton is also seeking for the school district to pay legal fees and compensatory and punitive damages for emotional suffering.

Reviewing all this, one can’t help thinking how none of this had to happen if there’d been a little more understanding that day in May.

A mother just commented about her 5-year-old autistic son getting suspended from school for the day. He is, she writes, able to keep up academically—-support and suggestions?

It seems no wonder that right wing talker Michael Savage’s last name is, well, “Savage” after reading what he said about autism on his radio show. I’ll list the words he uses to refer to autism:

moron, putz, idiot, fool, dummy, a girl, losers, beaten men

More of Savage’s savagery is quoted on Left Brain/Right Brain.

If Savage’s intent was to shock, using such words about autistic children is a no-brainer way to do it and perhaps ratings will spike as rightfully indignant autistic self-advocates and parents of autistic children respond. What troubles me in particular is Savage’s contention that autistic children are just brats behaving badly, and brats parented by laissez-faire “let it be” types of parents, especially in the wake of more than a few stories of autistic children who have been removed from a church, a kindergarten classroom, an airplane, and a restaurant. In each case, the children’s behavior was cited as “dangerous” to “public safety” and just downright “unacceptable.”

Funny but behavior like Savage’s–his unacceptable pronouncements about autism—gets air-time. Perhaps we have found the actual parasite……

Long Before Legos, Wood Was Nice and Did Suffice proclaims today’s New York Times in explaining why industrial designer Tucker Viemeister prefers, and still has, sets of Froebel wooden blocks. Froebel blocks are named for Friedrich Froebel, who created kindergarten and who also devised the idea of making boxed sets of blocks “meant to inform and inspire children about symmetry and beauty.”

Charlie has had numerous sets of Legos of numerous sizes and of blocks over the years. While he has readily learned how to build sculptures of our designing, he has never been too interested making things of his own from Legos, or K’nex, or from the numerous plastic pieces of a marble run. Charlie’s preference has long been for toys made of wood: the tracks of his train set (long since given away), the peg puzzles he adored as a preschooler, the sets of blocks he (as a 2 year old) built elaborate structures out of (he has never done this again), this rainbow—something about the feel and smell of the wood and maybe also the sound, instead of the thin echoes of plastic pieces, seemed to appeal to him.

And there’s this observation from Viemeister (who designs products like this vegetable peeler which certainly does a fine job peeling carrots when I’m cooking for Charlie):

With Legos, he said, the play process is more tilted toward a goal: the house or ship or castle that you build and are finished with. The Unit Blocks — with nothing to hold them together, and difficult to move when assembled — encourage a more fluid, open-ended process that is never quite finished and easily started anew.

No wonder, though so many toys have come and gone, we still have that old set of wooden blocks.

Froebel blocks photo courtesy of antimega via Flickr; yes, the colored blocks are Charlie’s!.