If Charlie’d had a younger sibling, would we have decided to participate in studies like this one at the University of Washington, as noted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Autism researchers at the University of Washington are seeking parents who will allow them to do brain scans of their infants.
………….
The UW scientists are looking for 84 six-month-old infants from California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Nevada and Alaska who have an older sibling who has been diagnosed with autism. They also need 34 infants with typically developing older brothers or sisters.
Each child will be scanned three times over two years.
Certainly I would have …read more

Brooke Dickerson’s 19-year-old so, Quinn Carey, has attended 10 different schools, yesterday’s Santa Cruz Sentinel reports. Diagnosed with autism as a young child, Quinn has not been able “to receive the consistent care that is needed to develop the skills he is lacking.” His mother notes that his physical size has been a factor:
Now fully grown at 6 feet tall and about 300 pounds, Quinn is more than a handful. The family has taken him to schools in Morgan Hill, San Jose and Palo Alto, but the schools shut down or turned Quinn away because of his size.
“It’s nuts …read more

Special education law advocate Wrightslaw posts about the handcuffing of a North Carolina middle-school student. Over at my friend Liz Ditz’s I Speak of Dreams blog is a post about crisis prevention training “to help professionals—those who have occasional workplace encounters with people on the autism spectrum—interact safely, effectively, and respectfully,” via the Crisis Prevention Institute.
Physical restraint can seem like “the only way” and a “last resort” but I think we need to focus on teaching autistic kids in ways appropriate to their needs and training and supporting teachers and staff, so things just never get to the point of …read more

From an ABC News report today about autistic children being handcuffed in a public school in North Carolina:
According to the complaint, one parent of a child attending the school reported that her son had allegedly been handcuffed around his ankles to prevent him from kicking during a temper tantrum, said John Rittelmeyer, a lawyer who represents the DRNC, and another parent claimed his son had bruised arms from teachers grabbing him.
One parent said the school had a “WWF room” — a reference to the former World Wrestling Federation — in which students were encouraged to wrestle with one another, according …read more

Handcuffs? The “WWF room”—a vacant classroom, “used to encourage students to wrestle with one another and teaching assistants to release aggression”?
As reported in WRAL today, these were methods used to improperly restrain autistic children in the Wake County School District in North Carolina. This morning, Disability Rights North Carolina, a disability rights groups, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Wake County Board of Education.
Here’s more about restraints and about timeout rooms. And handcuffs.
Small wonder that parents and school districts become adversaries.

Abuse, neglect and humiliation: Not exactly words that are generally associated with education, school, students, you’d think. But that’s not been the experience of some 100 parents of autistic children in Florida, according to today’s Scripps News. They’ve been calling the state attorney general and two Port St. Lucie families—including Melissa Barton, whose son Alex Barton was voted out of his kindergarten class—have filed notice that they intend to sue the school district. Parents are raising concerns about autistic children being restrained or secluded and about a lack of sufficient training and of teachers of autistic children in general.
“They’re just …read more

Much happened over the past two weeks but I want most of all to think about Evan Kamida, who passed away on July 24, just a few days shy of his eighth birthday. Please keep his mother Vicki Forman and Evan’s family in your thoughts and prayers—-and to honor his memory, here’s a small and lovely thing to do: Please take a photo of flowers at a swingset and post it to this Flickr pool. Shannon Des Roches Rosa and Jennifer Graf Gronenberg have posted more information.
Thinking of Evan.

Not a Team Player in the Office?—-Not Necessarily
The difficulties that …read more

“What Tim eventually said….was that he didn’t want to go to school because he thought the school was trying to kill him.”
John Miller, a podiatrist in Allegany, N.Y, says this about his 12-year-old son, who has Asperger Syndrome, and who was, according to a July 15th New York Times article, held down prone on the floor by teachers (one time for 20 minutes) when he was “confrontational.” The NYT article discusses something that is too familiar to me—and to parents of special needs children—-and that is, one suspects, a bit more than shocking to many. Kids coming home with bruises …read more

Put in a timeout room more than 90 times?
Coming home from school with cuts, bumps, and bruises?
Being held on the floor on his stomach by two adults?
All of these happened to 9-year-old Matthew Montgomery in Oldham County, Kentucky, WAVE 3 news reports. Some of them have happened to my son Charlie and maybe not everyone realizes this, but these kinds of physical restraints can have a long-lasting effect on an autistic child; on any child.
Matthew’s mother, Jeanie, took him out of school in March of 2008. She and her husband are now being charged with truancy by the school district …read more