Editorial #246: Getting Autistics Off the Dole

Think about this carefully. Schools are diagnosing autism where autism doesn’t exist so they can get funding to care for special needs students which may not really be special needs.  Some of these kids may be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders and are growing up to claim that because they have these disorders, they are disabled and cannot work.

So our tax dollars are going to pay for these people to be on disability.

Autism Politico’s opinion is that everyone who is diagnosed with any kind of disability for which they may become eligible for disability payments needs to have a thorough exam by accredited medical professionals to determine whether they even have that disability. 

If it turns out that the people claiming certain disabilities do not have them, then they should be denied disability payments, and the school districts which applied for funds on their behalf should be required to return them to the federal government. Also, given that people with these falsely diagnosed disabilities benefitted from special accommodations made by the school, they should be made to pay some compensation, perhaps even going as far as to retake school courses without assistance to see if they can achieve the same results without accommodations, like every other student who does not get them.

Also, people falsely diagnosed should have the right to sue their schools for compensation after being exploited for so long, and they should have the right to sue their parents for being complicit in such activities.

It is time to stop favoring people who are falsely diagnosed. It will save taxpayers money, get people off the government dole, and cause falsely diagnosed people to work harder for a living.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #243: Are schools your friend?

Autism Politico would like its readers to carefully the implications of schools diagnosing children with any disorder.

If a child has a disorder, a child may be entitled to additional funding to meet the educational needs of this special needs child. Autism Politico agrees that all children are entitled to an education and that all special needs students are entitled to whatever funding they may be entitled to under the law.

But Autism Politico also questions whether or not schools are qualified to make a diagnosis of any kind. They are not medical professionals. As far as autism goes, there are, under the DSM IV, different kinds of autism, and a medical diagnosis can take years, rather than hours or days to reach and accurate diagnose.

If a school can identify a child with special needs, then they must develop an IEP for that child within a specific time period, and they may apply for certain kinds of funding, depending on where these schools are situated. The amount of funding they are entitled to is also dependent on what the laws are in their locality.

In a time when cuts in funding are made to education, it seems that schools have additional motivation to secure funding wherever they can, and so the question arises as to whether or not children who are quickly diagnosed are properly diagnosed, or whether or not a diagnosis even exists.

While we as taxpayers can rest easy when we know our tax dollars are used for good purposes, when we see the number of autism diagnosis climb dramatically over a period of years, and when we see most of these diagnoses being made by schools rather than qualified medical professionals, can we continue to rest easily?

Could it be that schools are diagnosing special needs children so that they can make up for cuts in funding to regular education elsewhere?

A diagnosis follows someone the rest of their life the same way a conviction for a crime follows them for the rest of their lives.

Isn’t a false diagnosis under these circumstances the equivalent of exploitation of children for monetary gain? In which case, are schools our friends?

Keep in mind that when a child is diagnosed falsely, the parent of that child may believe the diagnosis and subject that child to all manner of legitimate and quack cures, causing themselves considerable expense, and causing their own child considerable trauma. All so that schools can make money.

Is this what we want from out schools?

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #241: How to Get Along In School Without Getting Beat Up

Autism Politico believes it may have learned how to get along in school without getting beat up.

You see, in most school situations there is an autistic thing to do, and there is a social thing to do. If you are autistic, you need to decide what is worth getting beat up over and what isn’t, and how much pain you stand to endure if you decide to do the autistic thing instead of the social thing.

QUESTION: Some kid needs to borrow a paper, pen or pencil. What do you do?

THE AUTISTIC THING TO DO:  Don’t give them anything! If they aren’t prepared, they cannot do their work, and if they cannot do their work, you stand to get a higher grade than they do. By not giving them anything, you are putting them in the line of fire from the teacher, who will surely reprimand them for not being prepared. By not giving them anything, you are preparing them for the real world, where unprepared people are fired from their jobs.  Whole companies have fallen because people like these infest workplaces like termites infest logs.

THE SOCIAL THING TO DO: Give them what they need. By not giving them anything, the teacher will reprimand you for not being friendly to your fellow student. By not giving them anything, you will be going against the code of the workplace, which is that you carry the weak along with the strong to make yourself look good in front of your boss. Even though whole companies have fallen thanks to people like these, people like these, who have learned to schmooze off of others rather than work for a living, have a habit of climbing up the ladder and hiring people like you. They have learned to climb because they have learned to wheedle people into doing their work for them. You, on the other hand, who actually do the work, get fired by wheedlers because you are a threat to them.

QUESTION: You are taking a quiz, A kid in school wants to copy your answers. What do you do?

THE AUTISTIC THING TO DO: Don’t give them the answers! By not giving them the answers, they may get a lower grade than you, and you have EARNED the grade, so you DESERVE a higher grade. By not giving them the answers, it forces them to ask other kids and risk being caught by the teacher. By not giving them he answers, it forces them to learn the answers for themselves.

THE SOCIAL THING TO DO: Give them the answers. Remember, these people are going to excel up the ladder in the workplace and become your future employers, so you need to give them every boost you can. Further, by now you’ve noticed that teachers harp on you for every little thing -mostly because they don’t like you- but overlook the fact that your question-asker beats the crap out of you nearly every single day on the playground. Do you really think the teacher -who doesn’t want to get involved with your bully’s parents any more than they have to- is going to want to catch your bully when they try to copy your answers? This is the age of social promotion and feel good education, where it doesn’t matter what kind of grades you get as long as you have good self-esteem. No one is going to “catch” your bully trying to cheat, and you stand to get into detention if you nark on your bully.

QUESTION: You see some bully beating up some kid on the playground. What do you do?

THE AUTISTIC THING TO DO: Tell the teacher! You’ve been beat up so you know how bad it feels. Do you really want some other kid to feel as badly as you did when you got beat up?

THE SOCIAL THING TO DO: Look at what the rest of the non-autistic kids are doing. They are yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!” This is because they know that this is the social thing to do. By joining in, they are held in good esteem by the bully (who will one day be their future employer), and we already know that the teachers do not want to have to talk to the bully’s parents again. So when you go to the teacher, the teacher will tell you not to tattle-tale, and then treat you poorly thereafter because since you told, they MUST get involved.

Autism Politico believes that the autistic way is the way to go, but then, we also notice that most autism advocacy organizations go with the social thing to do, unless they themselves are the victim, and then they cry like babies.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #240: Good News! Two Autism Schools in Two Years Have Problems!

Autism Politico is pleased to hear that a private autism school has lost accreditation and another one has closed within the past two years.

The story is a pretty extensive one, but we will focus on three small paragraphs of a very long article:

John Locke Academy, a mainstream high school, and the special needs School of Autistic Healing, opened as companion schools two years ago. They are largely run by the family of Bob Jones, the real estate developer blamed by many teachers and parents for the August 2008 closure of Utah Southvalley Community School (USC), a Murray private school formerly known as Woodland Hills.

Jones had acquired the financially strapped Woodland Hills, for children with Asperger’s syndrome and other cognitive and behavioral impairments, a year earlier and hoped to revive it, partly through introducing a comprehensive sports program. But the school suffered rapid teacher turnover —­ at least 50 teachers quit or were fired in one year — and some parents complained about the new focus on athletics.

The “School of Autistic Healing” is a silly name for a school seeing as how no government agency will state that there is a cure for autism. “Healing” implies that there is a way to a cure.

With regard to athletics, as we know, some autistics may suffer problems with coordination. Having them play sports if they don’t want to might cause them to feel even more inept that they already do. That a school would not understand this goes to show how little they know about autism.

At the time, Jones argued he had kept the school from closing and lost his own money in the process. In March 2009, he filed for bankruptcy, leaving behind $6.5 million in debts both from his real estate ventures and USC. The Utah Office of Debt Collection reports there are still 30 outstanding cases for unpaid wages to school employees.

That he invested his own money is nice, but considering the debts the ultimate fate of this man’s adventures, it’s best that the school closed before the attendees came to suffer from lack of proper funding. This is not to imply that the students would have suffered, but it appears from this story that the person behind the two schools doesn’t have much knowledge about autism or how to deal with autistics.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #223: How to diagnose ASDs.

Autism Politico wants to share with its readers something that it read on the US CDC website: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-screening.html Now, usually we embed the link within the context of the post, but not this time. We want people to see the link, click on the link, bookmark the link. As you will see, the process is long and extensive, and it is broken down on the CDC page:

Screening Recommendations

Developmental Screening in Pediatric and Primary Care Practice

Developmental Screening Tools

Diagnostic Tools

You’ll find lots of screening tools and diagnostic tools, as well as a lengthy explanation about why a diagnosis sometimes takes many different specialists observing the prospective autistics over a number of years.

The CDC also makes this statement regarding people in school who diagnose a child with autism:

Developmental screening can be done by a number of professionals in health care, community, and school settings. However, primary health care providers are in a unique position to promote children’s developmental health. 

Alternatively, you can ignore what the CDC says, join some web forum that claims to be populated by autistics, compare yourself to people who have never been diagnosed, and pretend you’re autistic, just like them.

Which would you rather do? And what does it say about you if you choose the second option?

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #175: Merry What?

Autism Politico wants to remind you…

1) If you are a caregiver who has subjected your autistic kid to quack therapies this year…

2) If you are a teacher who had subjected your autistic student to ABA therapy…

3) If you are a doctor who put an autistic patient on an autism registry…

4) If you are a government official who has denied funding for autistics…

5) If you are an employer who has denied a capable autistic employment…

6) If you are a person who made fun of someone with autism…

7) If you are a member of an autistic advocacy organization who bullied autistics who do not agree with your points of view on autism…

Holiday greetings and presents during the holiday season are hollow, meaningless gestures that only reinforce your disrespect for your fellow human beings and remind autistics that there isn’t much point in learning to socialize with people like you.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #117: Paying the Price for Bullying

What a joy it is to see that one school district is now charging a fine when bullies bully.

The Milton City Council recently approved a city ordinance that city officials hope will prevent bullying by toughening the community’s stance on harassment and charging offenders with fines. Fines for a first time offense could cost up to $100. Second time offenders could pay up to $500.

The upside of this is that parents will try much harder to stop their kids from bullying.

The downside is that whomever gets caught will more likely than not be seen as the bully, even if they are acting in self-defense.

A further downside is that sometimes autistics lash out when they are overloaded, or when their personal spaces are invaded, or when they are touched unexpectedly, or what have you. If they wind up getting slapped with a fine for that, the autistics in that district are going to have a fight on their hands trying to explain themselves and it is hard to know what would be the outcome of such an event.

Each situation has to be weighed in turn. In places around the world, there have been instances where, in response to situations where autistic children have gone ballistic in hit teachers, fellow students, etc., parents or caregivers have whined that the school districts have not been very accommodating to their children with autism. And yet, even when the districts gave the children everything the parents asked for, their kids STILL wound up hitting people and wrecking the classroom.

So this thing about the fine has got to be looked at more closely.

But here is the main point: If parents made more of an effort to stop their children from bullying in the first place, such radical measures like the one we see in Beloit would not be needed in the first place.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial # 78: Bullying in schools

Autism Politico is going to rant about schools. We need not list out all the articles about bullying of autistics in schools, or about bullying of anyone in schools. Bullying in schools happens every day. Bullying in schools has always happened, it seems.

But why does it happen?

While it is certainly true that not all bullying falls under the gaze of teachers and administrators, certainly teachers and administrators beginning to pick up on the fact that some students are bullied, and they may pick up on who the bullies are and who the students who are being bullied are.

But teachers and administrators seem to have the attitude that if the bullying take place, then the bullying never happened.

Some teachers and administrators avert their gazes when bullying happens right in front of them.

Either way, they should be stopping the bullying, but they do not.

Teachers and administrators will give different excuses for their inaction. Some will say that they are not paid to be baby-sitters. Others will say that they do not want to get caught in the middle of a situation that might result in a lawsuit. Still others will state that they have orders from above not to interfere.

No matter what the excuse is (and there are many more excuses than the ones Autism Politico has listed here) the REAL reason teachers and administrators do nothing is because they themselves are doing their bit on behalf of society: Trying to get the rejects (the bullied people) to shape up. They, like the bullies, think rejects are easy targets, and it is hard for teachers and administrators to go against their instincts and stop bullying when what they really want to do is jump in and thrash the bullied kids themselves.

So Autism Politico is telling parents of bullied children that you are the last hope for bullied kids. Don’t do what society does. Do not reject the rejects. Stick up for your kids. Get legal representation. Take the fight to the bullies, and if this means fighting  teachers, administrators, and schools, so be it.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #75: Info for parents about teachers

Autism Politico would like to clue parents in on something important regarding teachers who say they have training in the area of autism spectrum disorders.

Special education teachers will have a background in teaching, possibly a background in a particular subject, and some minor background in their area of interest, which may or may not be autism.

Other teachers may have taken a class or seminar or two that cover autism spectrum disorders in a general way.

Only a few teachers will have studied autism in depth.

But no matter what a teacher’s background is, unless the teacher has actually raised a child with autism, or better yet, unless a teacher is on the autism spectrum, it is doubtful that any teacher will truly be able to understand how autism presents itself and how autism functions.

Good parents of an autistic child will have looked into autism very deeply and will have a good idea of their child’s needs. Parents should trust their instincts and push for what they think their child will need in the classroom.

At the same time Autism Political would be wrong if it failed to point out that some parents are so clueless that teachers without ANY experience in autism spectrum disorders may know a heck of a lot more than parents who have been raising a child with autism since birth.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

Editorial #68: Jim and Jenny #2

Autism Politico notes that Jenny McCarthy is closing down her autism school. This is a good thing. After all, what does a parent of kid who does NOT have autism know about autistic kids?

Autism Politico isn’t going to speculate about the reasons for the closing, but hopes that all the people who have put faith in Jenny’s knowledge of autism are seeing now where that faith got them, and are seeing Jenny’s true commitment to autistics.

It is a happy time for autistics that this has happened, and here is hoping this happiness spreads.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.