A St. Paul family is suing after the school district decided to bar Newman, their son’s service dog, from his public school, Como Park Elementary. Newman, a Golden Retriever, is connected to 8-year-old Wally LaBerge throughout the day via a harness, yesterday’s WCCO notes. While service dogs have been more and more widely used to assist autistic children, there’s been more than a little disagreement about their presence in public places, from schools to airplanes to apartments. It’s noted that the dogs are calming and help to allay anxieties: Until it’s widely understood how much a service dog can help an autistic child, they’ll be more of these sorts of disputes, and more anxiety, and antagonism.

And not enough learning on either side.

In the past year, there have been more and more reports about the benefits of therapy dogs for autistic children at home and at school. There’s also been at least one instance in which a therapy dog was excluded from the schoolbus and a preschool, as happened to 4-year-old Jayden Qualis in Manteca, California.

Currently, Congress is considering the ADA Restoration Act (HR 3195 and S 1881), which defines disabilities more broadly than some other recent court decisions, and therefore has higher education officials concerned. HR 3195 amends

……the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 to: (1) redefine “disability” as a physical or mental impairment, a record of a such impairment, or being regarded as having a such impairment; and (2) define additional terms, including “mental impairment” and “physical impairment.”

At the same time, the Department of Justice is proposing new regulations that would “limit the accommodations universities and other entities must provide under the existing law,” according to the June 17th Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only). The new regulations call for:

(1) A decrease in the proportion of seats that an “assembly area”—such as a stadium or sports arena—has to make accessible to people who use wheelchairs:

“Now that figure is about 1 percent, with the exact proportion depending on the size of the venue. A stadium of 5,000 seats, for example, must provide space for 51 wheelchairs. Stadiums larger than that must provide one more space for every 100 additional seats. Under the proposed new regulations, a stadium of 5,001 seats would have to provide space for 36 wheelchairs. One more space would be required for every 200 additional seats a stadium has. For a stadium with a 50,000-person capacity, that would mean 261-as opposed to 501-handicapped-accessible spots.”

(2) Limits on service animals, which are to be distinguished from “emotional support animals”; the latter are not covered under federal law:

“Animals whose sole function is to provide emotional support, comfort, therapy, companionship, therapeutic benefits, or promote emotional well-being are not service animals,” the Justice Department said in an early copy of the proposed regulations posted online.

Support animals, like ferrets and snakes, have been a sticking point for colleges, where students have asked to keep them in residence halls and take them to class.

“The arguments have been made with increasing frequency in recent years that lots of animals other than traditional service animals should qualify,” said Michael R. Masinter, a professor of law at Nova Southeastern University. The new regulations would define service animals as those that are specially trained to perform a demonstrable task. That definition may still include “psychiatric-service animals” that remind their owners to take medication or that interrupt incidents of cutting or other self-mutilation.”

The decrease in the proportion of seats for people with wheelchairs does not directly affect autistic individuals, but it certainly affects individuals with disabilities. A literal decrease in the numbers of places for disabled individuals in a public setting is a change in the wrong direction.

The proposed regulations about service animals vs. “emotional support animals” need to be considered as there is more interest for autistic children to be accompanied by therapy dogs in public settings, such as schools. Will arguments be made distinguishing a visually impaired person’s need for a seeing eye dog, in contrast to an autistic child’s need for a therapy dog to calm and lessen her or his anxiety?

And, there is generally a lot of hesitation to referring to autism and autism spectrum disorders in the category of “mental disability/impairment/health, etc.” But what if recourse to such categories is necessary to ensure that an autistic child can have a therapy dog in school with them?

Nuala Gardner’s son Dale was born in 1988 and diagnosed with autism. In an essay in yesterday’s Guardian entitled The day I could no longer cope with my autistic son, she writes about how she contemplated suicide when her son was three years old but did not:

At the time I felt incredibly guilty about how close I came to taking my own life, but I now know that many full-time carers reach that level of desperation. I was mentally and physically exhausted; I was on the brink. I’ve since been on a suicide intervention course, and through my work I’ve met at least 10 other carers who have nearly lost the battle - nearly given up on getting the help they need. We are all only human, there’s only so much we can bear, but the help is there [my emphasis]. I’m just glad I found it before it was too late.

Dale is now in college and Gardner has written a book, A Friend Like Henry, about the therapy dog that changed Dale’s and his family’s life.

It might seem impossible, but carers, parents, fathers, mothers, need to take care of themselves and to remember to take care of themselves. Gardner is honest about her desperation, mental and physical exhaustion and fears; in her essay, she shows why she could not at first cope and communicate her needs. But the help is there and Gardner was able to find it and hopefully her story will lead more people to help, and hope, too.