SCHAFER AUTISM REPORT "Healing Autism:

No Finer a Cause on the Planet" ________________________________________________________________

Monday, December 29, 2003 Vol. 7 No. 256

FORENSIC

* Schools Accused of Criminalizing Disability

ADVOCACY

* Autistic Man Wins Court Fight in UK

EDUCATION

* Segregated Learning Hurts Social Education

PUBLIC HEALTH

* Pollution in People

RESEARCH

* Genetic Analysis Of Psychiatric Disorders Associated

With Human Chromosome 18

FORENSIC

Schools Accused of Criminalizing Disability

Discipline leading to lawsuits

[By Harvey Rice.]

Matthew Herzog hurled his book bag onto his desk during a ninth-grade class at Stratford High School on an October day in 2001.

The desk broke, setting off a chain of events that led to a federal lawsuit by Mark and Colette Herzog against the Spring Branch school district and nine school and police officials.

The Herzogs say their son's action was caused by Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary, sudden movements or speech.

But Matthew's teacher accused him of willfully destroying school property and summoned the grade-level principal, who called school district police, the Herzogs say.

The teacher and principal helped a police officer pin the boy down, handcuff him and force him into a police car, the Herzogs allege. Their lawsuit accuses the officers of striking Matthew numerous times, bruising his face, spraining a knee and fracturing a foot.

The Herzogs and Spring Branch officials will not discuss the lawsuit, but advocacy groups say such incidents indicate a disturbing attitude by many school administrators toward behaviorally disabled children.

They say some administrators use school police to dodge the time-consuming processes dictated by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires specially trained teachers and a separate program for each disabled child.

"This is a major problem," said Richard Lavallo, attorney in the Austin office of Advocacy Inc., which Congress created to protect the legal rights of the disabled.

Although it is difficult to determine how many lawsuits like the Herzogs' have been filed in Texas, the use of police against disabled students has become common enough nationally that the Center for Law and Education in Washington, D.C., has developed strategies for suing school districts in such cases.

The center outlines the strategies in a report titled, "When Schools Criminalize Disability, Education Law Strategies for Legal Advocates."

The report, which mentions Texas as a problem state, accuses some administrators of intentionally misinterpreting a 1997 change in the Disabilities Act that allows schools to report crimes by behaviorally disabled students.

School officials chafed at having to devote more effort to behaviorally disabled children and saw the 1997 change as a license to call police into the classroom, said Eileen L. Ordover, a Louisville, Ky., lawyer who wrote the Center for Law and Education report on legal strategies.

Ordover said many school districts are unwilling to treat disabled children's behavior differently from that of normal children.

After 1997, she said, "You saw schools starting to invoke the power of the justice system as a way of getting kids out of their school."

Karen Snead, director of education for the Arc of Greater Houston, a group that advocates for the disabled, said school officials sometimes find it easier to call police than to follow specialized and sometimes expensive programs required by federal and state law for each disabled student.

The programs require special training for dealing with behaviorally disabled children, who often do not respond to traditional disciplinary methods as normal children do.

If handled improperly, a minor behavioral episode can quickly escalate into a major incident, Snead said.

"They call police, the situation escalates and the child freaks out," Lavallo said. "The child starts hitting back and they end up in a juvenile facility."

Parents sometimes file lawsuits, but more often the disabled child is charged with a crime and hauled into court, Ordover said.

Denise Pierle says Conroe school police have charged her two behaviorally disabled sons with crimes for actions caused by their disabilities.

Her son Andy, who has Tourette's syndrome and a learning disorder, was charged with making a terroristic threat when he was 15 for saying, "A bomb will go off and kill all life on the planet Earth," Pierle said.

"The school district does not value kids with special needs," she said. "They never have."

Spokeswoman Kay Galindo said the Conroe district strongly supports disabled students, but cannot comment on individual cases.

Daniel McCall, a Houston lawyer who has represented disabled students in several lawsuits against area school districts, said many administrators are hostile toward disabled students.

"They think these kids are getting unnecessary protection and escaping their ability to have control over them," McCall said.

He called this a cultural attitude that is more prevalent in more conservative suburban areas than in the inner city.

David Beinke, a special-education advocate based in Austin, said the the Klein, Spring Branch and Conroe school districts are among the worst offenders in the Houston area. All three districts dispute that.

"It's easier to call the police than follow federal guidelines," Beinke said. "They're not cost-effective."

Even police acknowledge that they occasionally are misused. The head of the Texas Association of School District Police says that school police often complain about being used improperly to enforce classroom discipline.

"It happens a bunch of times," said association President Lt. Jeff Ward of the San Antonio school district police. "The police officer should not be a shortcut to classroom management."

Autistic children, in particular, react in unexpected ways to police, and things can go very wrong if a police officer is unfamiliar with autism, said Dennis Debbaudt, a Florida private investigator who teaches officers around the nation on how to deal with autistic children.

Lisa Calvin believes that is what happened to her autistic son Adam, then 8, at the Klein district's Haude Elementary School in November 2002.

Calvin, whose $10 million federal lawsuit against the district was dismissed until she exhausts administrative appeals, said she found Adam writhing, handcuffed, face-down on the classroom floor with a school police officer holding him down.

School district spokeswoman Liz Johnson said teachers called police as a last resort after Adam got out of control.

Debbaudt said autistic children are more sensitive to touch than normal children and often will struggle when restrained. "They don't know the futility of struggling," he said.

From school officials' point of view, dealing with behaviorally disabled students often involves decisions that can be second-guessed, said Cathryn White, the Spring Branch district's special-education administrator.

Once school police are called, she said, an incident becomes a police matter and school officials have no authority.

"It's complex when you get a student who breaks the law but, because of their disability, they truly do not understand," White said.

In such situations, she said, school officials must ask: Has the student's condition been assessed, is his educational plan being followed, does he understand what he did and was he able to control his behavior? "It does come down to a judgment call," she said.

Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

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ADVOCACY

Autistic Man Wins Court Fight in UK

nt_objectid=13750238_method=full_siteid=50100_headline=-Autistic-man-wins-co

urt-fight-name_page.html

An Autistic man is set to receive substantial damages from Greenwich council after it failed to give him the education he needed.

At the High Court on Friday, Judge Sean Overend accepted the man, now 23, was not given an appropriate education.

If he had, he might have been able to work and lead an independent life.

Instead, his "fire-setting tendency" has seen him compulsorily detained in a mental hospital.

The judge said an educational psychologist who examined the man when he was aged 10 "should have appreciated that he did not present or have the profile of a child with emotional and behavioural (EBD) difficulties".

Although his condition was undiagnosed at the time, he suffered from Asperger's Syndrome - but was placed in a school for disturbed youngsters which was inappropriate to meet his needs.

The expert's "failure in that regard fell below the standard of a competent educational psychologist", the judge ruled.

He added: "It was not necessary at the time he wrote his report for the expert to have diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome, or autism in any form, for him to have appreciated the unsuitability of sending this boy for placement in an EBD school."

Judge Overend also said there had been a two-year delay in placing the boy in a specialist school and he found the explanations for that unacceptable. But he added he was unable to say whether that had been negligent.

The judge's ruling guarantees the man - named in court only as "W" - a payout from the council.

Unless settlement terms are agreed, the amount of his damages will have to be assessed at another court hearing.

W's schooldays were marked by expulsions and failure.

He descended into a spiral of disturbed behaviour, culminating in him pleading guilty to a string of arson offences in 2001 and being sent to a mental hospital where he is detained.

Judge Overend said W's future was "bleak". Once released from the mental hospital he would need to live in a sheltered environment and sheltered employment for the rest of his life.

However, Judge Overend said there was a possibility that W's "fire-setting tendency" might have developed even had he received an appropriate education and that would have to be taken into account when assessing the amount of his payout.

* * *

EDUCATION

Segregated Learning Hurts Social Education

Educator, Parents Seeks More Than Mainstreaming

Fayetteville, AR — What Amanda George wants most of all is to get married and have babies.

The trouble is that Amanda, although she graduated from Fayetteville High School, was never really part of the class of 2000. While she was learning basic academics, she missed out on the social opportunities that teach youngsters how to make friends and build relationships.

That's where the "self-contained classroom" concept of special education failed her, her mother believes. Even though Amanda attended some regular classes, like physical education, and ate lunch with her "typical" peers, she spent most of her time in a classroom with other special education students and never enjoyed the full extracurricular experience that is high school.

"It's not about sitting in an algebra class to learn algebra," said Kerry George, who was for many years a special education teacher at Elmdale Elementary School in Springdale. "In a perfect world, I would love for her to have had instruction in the areas she needed — home economics, vocational education, computers, skills she could apply later in life — but with kids who were typical. That way, she could feel like she belonged to a group.

"Kids were nice to her when she was little," George recalled. "But junior high got harder, and she didn't have a lot of friends in high school.

"She knew she was missing out on the things other kids did," George said. "I think she knows she'll always be on the outside looking in."

Amanda's experience of attending even some regular classes was a benefit won after years of court challenges that began in the 1970s and continued through the '90s. At first, officials considered it good enough just to get the special education students into the same school building.

Then came the battles over mainstreaming and the idea that school is for more than academics; it is where children learn social skills and how to be part of a community.

"Segregated learning experiences lead to segregated life experiences," said Doug Fisher, a professor at San Diego State University. "Inclusive learning experiences provide the skills to be out there and work and play and have fun and make friends and have families.

"If you want a kid at 18 or 22 to have a rich life, connected to the community, with lots of social relationships, that kid has to be around other kids. Our ability to make friends is formed when we're young."

School districts today operate under the doctrine that each child must be educated in the least restrictive environment possible, meaning a regular classroom whenever possible.

The Next Step Fisher advocates something that goes beyond "inclusion" or "mainstreaming" for "kids with IEPs," as he calls special education students with individualized education programs. He refers to the cutting-edge philosophy as "universal design."

"We're working on the concept of universal design in curriculum so that as curriculum is planned, it's planned to include all the learners in the classroom — kids with IEPs, English-as-a-second-language learners, gifted and talented learners," Fisher said. "Then it doesn't require as much reactionary modification."

Studies, Fisher said, clearly demonstrate that students with special needs blossom when exposed to their peers.

"The only way kids with disabilities are going to learn the kinds of behaviors we expect (in society) is to be in those environments," he said. "Kids with disabilities are pretty good at modeling what their peers do — and if their peers are the other five kids in a one-to-six classroom, those are the behaviors they're going to model."

There isn't much hard data on how inclusion changes a regular classroom for the other students in it. But Fisher said the studies that have been done show that, thanks to the support of paraprofessionals, teachers don't spend an inordinate amount of time focused on students with special needs.

"Some days, that kid needs more help, more attention, but other days, other kids need more help," he said. "It evens out."

The Teen Years Amanda's primary diagnosis is autism, resulting in global developmental delay. In simpler terms, she functions at about a second-grade level: She still enjoys her Barbies and Cabbage Patch dolls, and among her favorite movies are "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Lilo and Stitch."

On the other hand, Amanda is able to alphabetize and file, do some keyboarding and mail out paychecks as part of her job at Arkansas Support Network, a nonprofit agency that assists people with developmental disabilities.

"They used to look for things for her to do," George said. "Now, when a new job comes up, they say, 'I bet Amanda could do that.' She does about 15 different tasks now."

George was a student in the master's program at Syracuse University when she took Amanda as a foster child. It seemed only logical for George to bring her daughter back to Fayetteville, where she grew up, in 1987.

George expected support from the Fayetteville schools. She had studied special education at the University of Arkansas and had taught the first class specifically for autistic children at the Richardson Center, the region's first school for children with special needs. Instead, George said she was encouraged to take Amanda to Springdale with her.

"I didn't want to confuse my roles as teacher and mother," she said. "I wanted her to go to school in Fayetteville — and I was willing to be flexible."

Amanda moved through various grade schools in Fayetteville until finally she landed at her home school, Asbell Elementary, for fifth and sixth grades. There, she was in a special education "resource room" part time and attended regular classes — called mainstreaming — part time, and that's the curriculum George wanted in junior high.

"I've never pushed for full inclusion (in regular classes), but they wanted to move her to a classroom with one teacher for six students generally reserved for the most severely disabled students, George recalled. "My biggest concern was that she would imitate everything — and the next thing you know, she'd be walking with a limp! There were other options."

Disputes Arise George wound up in a battle with the school district under the rules for due process. At the end of the two-year marathon of hearings and investigations, Amanda was moved to the one-to-six classroom.

Deborah Wilson, now director of special services for the Fayetteville School District, cannot discuss any student's specific circumstances.

"My job is to implement the law, and the law says to look at each child individually and look at (the child's) needs, and that's what we try to do," she said in answer to the question about Amanda. "Each child is different."

Wilson does agree that due process can be difficult for everyone involved, and once a decision is made by the hearing officer, it's final — unless an appeal takes the case into the court system. Starting this fall, school districts and parents have another option, mediation.

Mediation, explained Nancy Mathews, a licensed psychological examiner and longtime mediator, isn't arbitration.

"In arbitration, you have somebody making a decision," she explains. "In mediation, the parties make the decision and sign off on it. It's an informal process that produces a formal result."

A conflict between school and parents can go to mediation at either's request, and Mathews said a discussion can usually be scheduled within 10 days.

Michael's Inclusion During the difficult period when she was struggling with Amanda's placement in Fayetteville schools and the due process procedure, Kerry George often turned for support to Lynn Donald, Northwest Arkansas' original advocate for inclusion.

Donald, who is now a program manager for family support programs at Arkansas Support Network, started the battle for inclusion for her son, Michael, in 1988. Michael was injured at birth and, in his mother's words, "was so physically disabled he couldn't sit up on his own." He was also severely delayed cognitively.

"But he was a really happy kiddo," Donald recalled. "He laughed a lot, loved music, loved to be bounced around — and he loved to be around other kids."

It was Michael's enjoyment of his peers, coupled with Donald's interest in "state-of-the-art" educational practices, that led her to believe Michael needed to be in the regular classroom. At that time, she explained, children with severe disabilities just stayed at the Richardson Center throughout their school careers. "But there was a big movement at that time for public schools to accept responsibility for the education of those kids," Donald said.

"On the local level, I think a lot of the impetus had to do with the expense of having those kids separated out," she said, explaining that the school districts paid for programming at the Richardson Center. "But there was also a new idea: That these are our kids and we can educate them — and we should."

Michael was 7 when Donald and her husband, Joel Carver, a physician in Springdale, began to push for their son to go to music classes at the elementary school he would ordinarily attend. The school district paid for Michael to be bused to Springdale from the Richardson Center twice a week for 30 minutes of music. Then the Carvers asked for another 15 minutes a day so Michael could go to the regular classroom and then go on to music class with his peers.

"We didn't anticipate any problem," Donald recalled. "The law said he could go to school. But the school he was at didn't have any special education classes, and they were panicked. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but Kerry George and Don Johnson, the principal at Elmdale, came to talk to us. They said he could come to Elmdale — and we were so gratified by that offer."

"At first we were all kind of skeptical," Johnson recalled. "It was a learning experience for us all. It helped me learn what people can do."

Attitude Barriers Michael celebrated his ninth birthday in June 1990 and died in October of that year. Donald said no one ever encouraged her to put Michael in an institution, but it took his short stay in public school to convince her he could have a life without her constant involvement.

That moment of epiphany happened when she and Michael were waiting to see the pediatrician. He was making a sound that meant he was cranky. A little girl from his school came across the waiting room to Michael and told his mother, "He's just tired and wants out of his wheelchair," she recalled.

"From that moment, I never looked back," Donald said. "There is no good excuse for any child being deprived of that kind of experience — that simple kind of friendship. And the other kids were learning something from him, too! "Nobody tells parents of kids with severe disabilities that they can't come to public school anymore," Donald said. "The biggest barrier kids still face is attitude."

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PUBLIC HEALTH

Pollution in People

AV1.DTL

Every Day, we get new warnings about what we should or should not eat. Eat fatty fish; it's good for your heart. Don't eat certain fatty fish; they contain too much mercury. It's enough to make you throw up your hands in despair and head for a piece of chocolate fudge.

Missing from all this confusion is scientific certainty about how environmental pollution actually affects our health. Do pesticides harm our immune system? Do chemical toxins pose a heath risk? How much does air pollution contribute to the skyrocketing rate of asthma? Could air or water pollution contribute to rising rates of breast cancer, autism and birth defects? We just don't know.

Last year, a study called "The Body Burden" found unacceptably high levels of toxins in participants who agreed to be tested.

That is why biomonitoring -- research that measures the levels of chemicals in our bodies by analyzing samples of blood, tissue, urine and breast milk -- is so urgently needed.

During the last few years, a network of public health, faith, labor and environmental health groups -- known as the California Body Burden Campaign -- has championed legislation that would make California the first state in the nation to establish a biomonitoring program.

"A comprehensive biomonitoring program," said Jeanne Rizzo, executive director of the Breast Cancer Fund, would allow us to identify the cancer- causing chemicals that exist in different communities around the state, and act to remove these toxic contaminants."

Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, has introduced legislation that would create "The Healthy Californian Biomonitoring Program" (SB689).

"Biomonitoring," Ortiz has said, "is the next logical, critical step for us to take in addressing threats to public health. Our technology and science at this time in history offer us the tools to identify environmental agents so that we can craft the best public-health strategy to enable a better quality of life. It is my hope that this research can lead to more deliberate decision- making as we tackle chronic diseases and cancers that are pervasively and frighteningly invading our families and personal lives."

The pilot programs established by SB689 would focus on biomonitoring using breast milk as a marker of community health.

Cancer advocacy groups have long promoted breast-milk monitoring because more than 200 toxic substances, including flame retardants, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT and other pesticides, have been found to accumulate in the fatty tissue of the breast.

At the same time, the bill would counter new mothers' concerns through the development of educational materials that emphasize the importance of breastfeeding to community participants.

Last April, the bill passed the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. In January, however, it will face new votes in other committees.

We urge the Legislature to pass this pioneering legislation. An ounce of prevention is worth tens of thousands health-care dollars.

* * *

RESEARCH

Genetic Analysis Of Psychiatric Disorders Associated With Human Chromosome 18

ds=14690303&dopt=Abstract

Kamnasaran D.

The Arthur and Sonia Labatts Brain Tumour Research Centre, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ont. dkamnasa@sickkids.ca

Current models on the etiology of psychiatric disorders support the idea of a biologic cause as well as interactions of biologic systems with the environment.

The elucidation of the genetic etiology is of paramount importance to understand the cause of psychiatric disorders.

Human chromosome 18 was identified as one of the first chromosomes to be aberrant in psychiatric patients and has subsequently served as a model to identify the molecular cause.

In this article I review a multitude of methodologies that can be used in determining the genetic basis of schizophrenia, affective disorder and autism associated with human chromosome 18.

These strategies include the use of chromosome aberrations, linkage and association studies, mouse-human comparative genomics, mutation analysis on candidate genes, trinucleotide repeat expansion studies, search for genes demonstrating parental effects and bioinformatics.

Current data from the use of these methods are cited from the literature.

Linkage and association studies have suggested at least 2 candidate loci on the short and long arms of chromosome 18 for each of these psychiatric disorders.

Some loci are supported by the mapping of chromosome aberrations from psychiatric patients.

Mutation analyses of psychiatric patients with 4 candidate genes (NEDD4L, IMPA2, PACAP and GNAL) mapping within these loci have been unsuccessful, although an association was found with the IMPA2 gene in patients with schizophrenia.

With these methods and findings, our understanding of the cause of psychiatric disorders associated with human chromosome 18 has improved and will advance, especially with emerging data from the human and rodent genome projects.

PMID: 14690303 [PubMed - in process]

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