FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER Sacramento, California http://www.feat.org
January 21, 2002 News Morgue Search www.feat.org/search/news.asp
· Bush Proposes $1 Billion Increase for IDEA
· Enron Hits Autism Family
· Giving Kids A Helping Hand: Little Wonders Spark Sweet Joy
· Churchgoers Pray For Autism Breakthrough
· At 14, an Outsider Is Feted
· Autistic Therapy Program Threatened By Budget Cuts
[By Sonya Ross, Associated Press.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7297-2002Jan19.html
President Bush announced plans Saturday to devote an extra $2 billion to federal programs for special education students and the nation’s poorest schools. Such a commitment, he said, is in keeping with the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr.
Bush said he will propose, in his 2003 budget plan, a $1 billion increase in funding for federal Title I programs for disadvantaged students. He will also propose a $1 billion increase in assistance for “special needs” children under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“But we want these new dollars to carry to special education the same spirit of reform and accountability we have brought to other education programs,” Bush said. “We must have high expectations for children who are more difficult to teach or who have fallen behind.”
Bush used his weekly radio address to link the federal King holiday to his efforts to improve education, saying the “institutionalized bigotry” that King fought has been vanquished, and it is now time to take on less tangible struggles, such as ensuring equal education.
“Our challenge is to make sure that every child has a fair chance to succeed in life,” Bush said. “That is why education is the great civil rights issue of our time.
“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would accept no less than an equal concern for every child in America, and neither will my administration,” Bush said.
Earlier this month, Bush signed into law a far-reaching education bill that requires annual reading and math tests for children in grades three through eight beginning in the 2005-06 school year. It also mandates that schools bolster teacher qualifications and develop periodic “report cards” ranking their standardized test scores with other area schools.
Under the new law, schools must improve reading and math proficiency
among students and close performance gaps between wealthy and poor students
and between white and minority students. © 2002 The Associated Press
* * *
Enron Hits Autism Family
Employees Lost Jobs, Savings and a Sense of Trust
[By Rick Bragg in the NY Times. Thanks to Patty R. and Sharon H.] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/business/20WORK.html?ex=1012546909&ei=1&en =127ef34a86905ab2 <- - address ends here.
This is not just hard times, not just one more company to shut its doors in a sagging economy and leave employees with unpaid mortgages and uncertain retirements. It is not even simple greed, not merely another boss who sacrificed people for profits, who moved a plant to Mexico to avoid paying minimum wage.
This, said some of the 4,000 laid-off workers of Enron (news/quote), was a betrayal by executives who hid the corporation’s crumbling finances and fattened their bank accounts while their employees’ jobs and retirement funds - built from Enron stock - disappeared.
“What about us?” said Sandra Stone, 51, an executive assistant who lost a $49,000-a-year job and Enron stock rewards that were valued at $150,000 at one point.
As the corporation floundered, executives told workers it had never been more solid, said Ms. Stone, who said she routinely worked 12-hour days and skipped lunch. The long hours proved her loyalty to Enron, she said, and the overtime pay made life better for her and her 71-year-old mother, who lives with her in a two- bedroom apartment in Houston.
“They kept telling us, ‘Don’t sell, don’t sell, it’s going to go up.’ And they issued more options,” Ms. Stone said of the stock. She said that Kenneth L. Lay, Enron’s chairman, once told employees, “ ‘In a year or two, we’ll be laughing at this.’
“No,” she said, “we won’t.”
Commission and Congress investigate the company’s business practices, thousands of employees scramble for new jobs in a difficult economy. They say they may be forced to sell houses and they wonder how they will pay medical bills.
Mark Lindquist, a Web designer who lost a $56,000-a-year job and all his benefits, has to figure out how he can pay for therapy for his autistic son. “The upper-level executives got their money,” Mr. Lindquist said. “I was let go by voice mail,” he said.
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* * *
Giving Kids A Helping Hand: Little Wonders Spark Sweet Joy
[By Caitlin Cleary, Seattle Times.]
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?s
lug=fundforneedy20m&date=20020120
Inside the makeshift walls of the Kindering Center, crawling, walking and swallowing are not easy or automatic progressions but cherished victories.
In the classrooms, covered gamely with construction-paper gingerbread men, stunted vocabularies expand to include new words. Silly songs rescue lost speech. The world, complex and remote, is broken down into steps and patterns for children to learn and practice.
In this way, parents are given back, bit by bit, the children who started slipping away from them months before.
Every year, 1,000 families with disabled or medically fragile children come to Kindering Center, a nonprofit neurodevelopmental center that benefits from the Seattle Times Fund for the Needy. Kindering Center helps children under age 3 with conditions like cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and autism to walk, crawl, stand, play, eat, learn and communicate, and helps parents care for their children.
But the waiting list for Kindering Center, the only such facility of its kind on the Eastside, grows every year. In 2000, 166 children were turned away. The few other Puget Sound area neurodevelopmental centers also are full, said development director Jennifer Pineda.
With home visits, family counseling, intensive speech therapy, a specialized preschool program, and other crucial early interventions, the toddlers at Kindering Center gradually transition into school, buoyed by better motor, language and social skills.
This is how Molly Morgenstern is emerging, bit by bit.
some form of autism. Last week in a classroom at the Kindering Center, she played with a mechanical frog, throwing plastic pieces into its opening and closing and rotating mouth, her father, Mark Morgenstern, watching close by.
“I had the book knowledge, the stereotypical view of what autism was,” said Morgenstern, a drug and alcohol counselor. “That it’s a kid rocking in the corner, not affectionate, not interested in the world. That stuff doesn’t apply to Molly.”
The 2½-year-old, diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, is affectionate and engaging. She knows her ABCs and her colors. She can count to 15, complete puzzles and memorize hours of Blue’s Clues videos.
Where Molly’s autism makes its mark is in the realm of communication. She can label things and echo words, but must learn how to communicate that she wants something. She has to learn how to sign, to imitate the actions of her peers, how to follow directions, how to eat and sit and play with other children.
The currency of Molly’s learning is music.
“Music is Molly’s most absolutely motivating thing,” said her teacher,
Kari Grimit. “That’s her best time, when she makes eye contact and imitates.”
Five days a week, Molly attends the CUBS program at Kindering Center, a mixture of preschool and intensive, one-on-one instruction, modeled after an autism-education project at the University of Washington.
After 90 days in the program, her vocabulary has nearly doubled, Morgenstern said, interrupting himself to exclaim that Molly has just made the sign for “more.”
Once a child who couldn’t get through a 10-minute “circle” of story time, Molly can now do things most children and parents take for granted: sitting still, singing, listening, putting her mat away, getting her coat.
“One of the hardest things I’ve had to do as a parent is to trash all
my underlying expectations of what her life is going to look like,”
Morgenstern said. “Now I just take it one day at a time.” Copyright © 2002
The Seattle Times Company
* * *
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_499741.html
Churchgoers are praying for British Prime Minister Tony Blair to make a major policy statement on autism for 2002 Autism Awareness Year.
The event, involving churches around the country, is part of a series of prayers this month.
They want action to help parents get the right services for children who suffer from the disorder and for more research into their rising numbers.
The year-long campaign was launched on January 9 in the House of Commons by Ivan Corea, 44, and his wife, Charika, 36, from Buckhurst Hill in Essex.
They were inspired by their own experience of getting help for their five-year-old son Charin, who is autistic, although they were quick to praise his school, Buckhurst Hill County Primary.
Organised by The Disabilities Trust and The British Institute for Brain Injured Children, the initiative is supported by some 300 organisations.
Mr Corea is hoping it will persuade the Government to provide for more specific allocations of funding for autistic children so there is no disparity between areas across the country.
He also wants it to launch a recruitment drive to tackle the “huge shortage” of teachers and speech therapists specially trained to help the youngsters.
With national numbers of people with autism at 520,000 and rising, he is pushing for research into the causes of the mysterious condition to be set in motion this year.
He said: “It could be a whole series of things, MMR (measles, mumps and rubella injections) or foetal distress. There needs to be a major research project into the rising numbers. It’s going to take a long time but let’s have some proper medical research.”
* * *
[By Ralph Blumenthal in the New York Times.]
http://www.iht.com/articles/45306.html
In the strange world of outsider art, Jonathan Lerman, at 14, is already an insider.
Autistic yet prodigiously artistic in the way of savants who display extraordinary talents, he suddenly began drawing at 10, breaking through autism’s isolating walls with a deluge of intensely rendered, sometimes comical and oddly familiar faces that one art writer likened to the work of George Grosz and Francis Bacon. He has had two solo shows and several group shows, and this month he will again be in the annual Outsider Art Fair in the Puck Building in SoHo, now in its 10th year of exhibiting the creations of self-taught artists, including the mentally disabled, visionaries and prisoners..
“Most autistic artists don’t show faces,” said Kerry Schuss, whose gallery, K.S. Art, has represented Lerman for four years and sold about 60 of his charcoal drawings for $500 to $1,200 each.
Lerman, retarded with an IQ of 53, is unusually gifted, said Schuss. “How the heck can this kid draw these things?” he said. “It’s almost like a musician with incredible chops. It’s kind of scary.” It is such quality that experts say distinguishes Lerman’s work from the creations of others who are mentally impaired..
On a recent visit to K.S. Art, Lerman bounded through its rooms, clearly excited by his drawings on the walls but unable to answer questions about them. “Hey, what’s your name?” he asked strangers again and again with the obsessiveness that is a hallmark of autism. Repeatedly he dashed to the front door, apparently expecting a crowd like the one that showed up for his 1999 show. “Is anyone home?” he kept asking..
Urged to do a drawing, Jonathan sat down at a table with a fine-tip pen and a CD album and with sure stokes and crosshatching deftly caricatured the cover photograph of Nirvana with Kurt Cobain, one of his rock star idols, complete with rude gesture..
Lerman’s work has yet to be critically reviewed, but John Thomson, chairman of the art department at the State University at Binghamton, near Vestal, where the family lives, said his work “would not be out of place in my classroom.” He called it “really exceptional, characterized by an amazing lack of stereotypes common to drawings of all age levels.”.
Lyle Rexer, an art writer, said Lerman’s work has elements of Grosz and Bacon “without the horror and shame” and made comparisons to the caricatures of the Mexican satirist Miguel Covarrubias, Carroll Dunham and Al Hirschfeld..
Like Lerman, outsider art defies easy definition, overlapping in some cases with folk art and covering not only the disabled and outcast, but also ethnic artists and rural imagists like Grandma Moses and Horace Pippin. First applied to work produced by psychiatric patients in a Swiss asylum in the early 1900s, it came to embrace a wider genre, championed by the Surrealists and Jean Dubuffet, who dubbed it Art Brut, raw art, uncooked by cultural influences..
This year’s outsider fair, from Jan. 25 to 27 at Lafayette and Houston Streets, also features the work of the reclusive fantasist Henry Darger and other untutored masters of the intuitively offbeat: a one-time Tunisian shepherd who made his first charcoal drawings on the wall of a bakery; an Englishman who began painting after a mystical experience in a churchyard, and a Romanian who swam across the Danube to flee communism and is obsessed with painting flying saucers. Further information on the fair is available at www.sanford smith.com.
* * *
[By SAMANTHA HUSEAS Log Cabin, Arkansas.]
http://www.thecabin.net/stories/012002/loc_0120020043.shtml
About six months ago Deane Amyx of Greenbrier heard words from her daughter she wasn’t sure she would ever hear: “Momma, I love you.”
The mother was sitting, rubbing her daughter’s arm, “because she still wouldn’t let us hug her much” when the toddler, then about 3 ½ years old, looked up at her mother and said those sweet words.
Amyx was happily surprised because “they had told me she may never distinguish me from anyone else.”
Looking at Erica Amyx today, a month away from her fourth birthday, she looks and acts like a normal, spunky, loving child. When stirred from a nap recently at the Faulkner County Day School, where she goes each weekday, she woke fairly easily and rested her head on her mother’s shoulder as her long, brown hair was brushed and put up in a pink bow.
Within a few minutes, she was walking around the Day School, holding hands with her mother, chatting with visitors, smiling at therapists who walked by and hamming it up for a photographer.
About two years ago, when Erica first started coming to the Day School, she was withdrawn, would not make eye contact with anyone, had stopped speaking and would not allow anyone to touch her.
Erica is autistic.
“It’s like she was in this little box and she could not stand to be hugged or touched and as a mother, that kills you,” Amyx said. “But now she’s back in our world. She can tell you her name and before she didn’t even know she had a name.”
While the numerous therapies she receives at the Day School have helped Erica to come out of her box, the girl is still probably about a year behind. Her next evaluation is in February, but at 24 months of age, she was at about a 15 months’ mental and social level. At her last evaluation, at 36 months, she tested at about a 26-month level.
“Her greatest improvements have been in her speech,” Amyx said. “For a long time, she didn’t say anything.”
Erica was born a healthy baby, weighing 10 pounds, 8 ounces. There were no complications in the pregnancy and the only medical difference between her birth and others is that is was a Caesarian section. But Erica’s older sister, Caitlin, now 11, was born the same way and had always developed typically, her mother said.
Erica, too, seemed to develop typically, only having a few common ear infections until about 15 months of age. That’s when Deane and her husband, Dale, started to notice something wasn’t right.
“She wasn’t responding to us, she was quiet and very distant, like she had gone into her own world,” Amyx said.
When Erica was 16 months old, she was sent to Arkansas Children’s Hospital for a battery of tests. They showed she was autistic.
· Article continues at:
http://www.thecabin.net/stories/012002/loc_0120020043.shtml
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