AUTISM FIRST STEPS
AUTISM DAILY NEWSLETTER    
Sunday, November 18, 2001   

INDEX:
*  Kids with special needs discover special place *  A different frequency Disability teachers risk injury *  N.J. gets autism center *  University of Florida drops two programs in budget cuts *  ADHD: a stimulating account
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Kids with special needs discover special place

Metro and State
Kids with special needs discover special place By Sharon K. Hughes
San Antonio Express-News Web Posted : 11/16/2001 12:00 AM Marina, 4, reaches across the circle, pats 3-year-old Morgan's cheek and mutters what sounds like: "Love you, Morgan."
Preschool at Steubing Elementary is a tuition service for Northside teachers, as special education students are mainstreamed in the program. Teacher Mary Ann Wegmann works with Marina Ramos, 4.
Express-News/Robert McLeroy
A typical preschool day at Steubing Elementary finds assistant teacher Misty Salazar attentive on the job.
It's an impromptu lesson for both students in the preschool at Steubing Elementary that brings children with special needs into a mainstream classroom.Morgan Guyness has Down's syndrome and is learning how to relate to other children.Marina Ramos has speech apraxia and is learning to talk.Their classroom is a full-day, paid preschool for the children of district workers. Special-education toddlers, who can start school at age 3, attend for a half-day.The Northside School District started early childhood collaboration this year on three campuses, said Pam DeFoore, coordinator of Child Find, the district's program for identifying children who need to start early.Special education students must be educated in the "least-restrictive environment," but Northside has few early childhood programs. Northside also works with private preschools to include special education children in mainstream classrooms.Officials got the idea for the collaboration from a similar program in the Round Rock School District, DeFoore said.Each classroom has a special education teacher, an early childhood education teacher and two instructional assistants.In the morning, the class at Steubing has Morgan, two autistic children and several others with speech problems. As the children make their way through the various learning centers, however, it is nearly impossible to determine which ones have special needs.Morgan, a tiny, curly-haired blonde with silver-rimmed glasses, has taken a special place among them. "Morgan is well-liked by a lot of the kids," special education teacher Mary Ann Wegmann said. "They take on a kind of motherly role with her. They lead her. They want to sit by her."And for Morgan, learning to be social is important.Her mother said she would have opted out of public school if there were no way for Morgan to be around children without special needs."It's a very happy environment," Wegmann said. "My kids are accepted. They've made a lot of friends. They feel like they're a part of things."Wegmann said the idea worried her at first, especially for her autistic children who don't learn much by modeling others.She set up a system where they can get a space to themselves, away from the bustle of the room, but they have also begun to mingle a little.For Marina, who was new to the class, the setup is ideal, said her mother, Jodi Ramos.Marina's brain has trouble telling her mouth how to form words. She has an average to above-average IQ, her mother said.At Steubing, Marina can learn from the other children. She also gets regular early childhood instruction and the same intense speech therapy she was getting at Helotes Elementary, Ramos said.While adults talked of the mainstream students learning about special needs, the children don't see their classmates as all that unusual.When asked if any of her classmates were different from other children, Rachel Burrier, 5, shook her head "no" without hesitating or looking up from the picture she was coloring."Isn't that wonderful?" DeFoore said.shughes@express-news.net
http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=180&xlc=522364
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A different frequency Disability teachers risk injury

A different frequency

The manager of the Point Depot tells Victoria Mary Clarke about life with his autistic daughter Cormac Rennick is a man to befriend. As the manager of Dublin's Point Depot, he can get your kids backstage for Westlife. The Stones, Bowie, Michael Flatley, the Spice Girls whoever takes your fancy, Cormac could get you in there. One imagines him living in a sexy penthouse in Ringsend, driving a Ferrari, hanging out with his VIP mates in their private jets.So meeting him and his wife Sarah at their Blanchardstown home seems somehow inappropriate. But this is his morning off and this is where he lives. From the outside, it's a perfectly normal life, with two kids in a suburban semi. But all is not as it seems. Cormac and Sarah have the requisite two kids Conor, 7, and Catherine, 5 but Catherine is autistic and because of this, their life is far from normal. I am invited to say hello to Catherine, but she doesn't want to talk to me. She is a delicate, pretty child who flinches when I approach and clutches her ear, as if in pain."Say hello, Catherine," Cormac says, but she looks frightened, looks away. The door must be left open as I chat with Cormac and Sarah in their kitchen, because Catherine likes doors to be open, but she's hypersensitive to noise. It's as though she can hear frequencies that we can't. She has just started in a new school specifically for autistic children. It was set up by Cormac himself, the result of years of campaigning for a proper education for his child and other similar children in the Dublin area. Cormac has plenty of experience with getting things done. He's been in charge of the Point Depot for seven years now and is obviously not someone to sit around waiting for things to happen all by themselves.His wife, Sarah, who was his deputy manager at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford, offers me tea. She is warm, friendly and articulate. Cormac, it is explained, has organised a concert, Stars of the Christmas Carol, on November 26 at the National Concert Hall, to raise money for PACT, Parents of Autistic Children Together. The concert also benefits the Irish Autism Alliance, which Cormac set up as an umbrella organisation, to get all the other ones listened to. I ask him if he's something of a politician. "Something like that. But I turned down the chance to be in politics 20 years ago. I don't think I could ever toe the party line." Catherine sneaks in and takes a bag of sweets. Cormac stops her. "Come back! You can't have the whole packet. Do you think I'm silly? Say thank you."Catherine says thank you, after some prompting. "Entertainment is my first love, anyway," he continues. "I didn't set out to be a crusader. All I'm trying to do is to give Catherine the chance to be as good as she can be." What do you want for Catherine, I ask."Children with autism need to have rights in legislation. And that should not be dependent on the current economic climate. They have a right to education as citizens of this country. And the only way that parents have been able to compel the Government to respond is by taking constitutional challenges. You are talking three-year court battles just to get the basic rights established, which is untenable." Sarah shows me a book which points to links between autism and diet. Catherine has been discovered to be severely affected by gluten and dairy products, and these having been removed from her diet, she now sleeps at night, which Sarah says is a godsend."We had no sleep at all, before we took Catherine off milk. When I look back at that, I don't know how we functioned," she says."With a lot of kids," Sarah explains, "autism seems to kick in around the age of two. So they follow a normal developmental curve until they are two. The evidence points to some sort of genetic predisposition to autism. It seems to be prevalent in families with a history of allergies, asthma, bowel disorders and things like that. But there is also an environmental trigger. They may get their first viral infection, their first dose of antibiotics, the MMR inoculation. There has been a lot of research into the links between the MMR and autism." As parents, I ask, what was it like to discover Catherine was autistic. "I suspected it for a long time," Sarah says. "When Catherine was 16 months old, I walked into the room one day and called her name, and she didn't respond to me. After that, I would sit in front of her and she wouldn't make eye contact with me. On her first birthday, she had walked downstairs in her party frock, looked at her aunt and said, 'Clever!' Within months, she'd stopped communicating. It took nine months to get a diagnosis. And we had that time to prepare ourselves."How has it affected your work running the Point, I ask."It has affected every area of our lives," says Cormac. "But it's not an option not to do my job properly. And it's not an option not to fight for Catherine's rights. Because if I don't, who else will?"'Stars of the Christmas Carol', in aid of PACT and the Irish Autism Alliance, National Concert Hall, November 26. Line-up includes Rebecca Storm, Brendan O'Carroll, the Vards; compere Marty Whelan. Tickets: 01 417 0000.
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=45&si=641521&issue_id=6415
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N.J. gets autism center

Disability teachers risk injury
By Megan Doherty

SOME ACT teachers working in special units for children with disabilities in mainstream primary and high schools are at daily risk of multiple injuries from their students, with one student inflicting 100 injuries in a single day.

The figures are contained in a new report, which also warns that teachers are running a high risk of burn-out and chronic ill health and claims the ACT Department of Education is failing in its duty to provide a safe workplace for teachers in some of the units.

It says anti-discrimination legislation is leaving teachers, schools and entire education systems feeling as if they have no right to "exclude students with disabilities from mainstream settings or to dictate where they receive their schooling".

Education consultant Helga McPhee was commissioned by the Australian Education Union to conduct the report into nine government learning support units in the ACT, eight in primary schools and one in a high school.

Ms McPhee found three of the nine units were unsafe.

She said parents and teachers were upset about inappropriate placements of profoundly autistic children in the units and confused about where the children might be placed after primary school.

The report claimed there had been no response from the Department of Education to these concerns.

The report recommended the department urgently develop procedures to suspend and exclude violent students "pending therapeutic intervention and improvement".

The report also supported the formation at the Woden School of a centre of excellence for children and young people with autism.

ACT Autism Association president Andrew Brien said he agreed with the report, except the description of the children as violent, saying the behaviour was a result of their disability and being in the wrong environment.

"Teachers are burning out, they are being injured by children when the children become confused, distressed or don't understand what's going on," he said.

"That's because there are too many children in the room and not enough resources to support them. We have brought this up over and over with the department and they will not listen."

There were 210 children with autism in the ACT and another 70 waiting for diagnosis.

Mr Brien said a centre for excellence for autistic children was first proposed three years ago to cater for profoundly autistic children and other less affected children who needed time-out to develop their social skills before tackling mainstream schools.

He said a 100-place centre would cost $1.75 million a year to run based on figures from the department.

A spokeswoman for the department said it had not received the report and the issues had not been raised with it by the union.

A spokesman for Education Minister Simon Corbell said the report could be addressed at an inquiry due to begin early next year.

It would determine how a $27 million injection into the education system should be spent.
http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=news&subclass=local&category=general%20news&story_id=108576&y=2001&m=11
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University of Florida drops two programs in budget cuts

N.J. gets autism center

Saturday, November 17, 2001By BOB GROVES
Staff WriterPISCATAWAY -- New Jersey will have one of four new national research centers to study whether environmental toxins -- such as lead, mercury, and second-hand smoke -- cause autism and other neurological disorders in children, federal health officials announced Friday.The new Center for Childhood Neurotoxicology and Exposure Assessment at Rutgers University here received a five-year, $5 million federal grant. The center will be run jointly by Rutgers and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School."We're witnessing an alarming increase in learning disability, attention deficit, and autism" in the United States, said Christine Todd Whitman, Environmental Protection Agency administrator and former governor of New Jersey."Children's health research is about prevention. That's really what our focus is," said Whitman, in announcing the federal grant at Rutgers' Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, where the new center will be located.Autism, a baffling life-long behavioral and developmental disorder, affects about 400,000 Americans, including one in every 500 children in New Jersey. Often it first appears in children between the ages of 18 months and 3 years. The cause of the disease is unknown, and there is no known cure.Symptoms include communication problems, social withdrawal, short attention span, and hyperactivity. Experts have long suspected that some children are genetically predisposed to autism, but believe the disease may be triggered by environmental factors.The EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Services have given $5 million grants to three similar centers in Ohio, California, and Illinois. They join eight other centers already established -- including two in the New York area, at Columbia University and the Mount Sinai Medical Center."We know there are important environmental components" to autism and other disorders, said Dr. Samuel Wilson, deputy director of the federal environmental health agency."But we don't have enough research to know how to intervene, or establish . . . disease conditions, or develop new drugs to fight new diseases," Wilson said.Until recently, "children's environmental health has almost been an afterthought," said Dr. George Lambert, director of the new center. He said that study of the effects of toxins on children is especially important because the developing brains of children are "more susceptible" to adverse effects.The new center will work cooperatively with advocacy groups such as the New Jersey Center for Outreach and Services for the Autism Community Inc., Lambert said.Albert Anayati of Paramus said the center "is a dream come true.""For so many years we have thought that something in the environment would cause autism," said Anayati, a member of the advocacy group New Jersey Cure Autism Now (CAN) and father of an autistic boy."It's a great step forward," said Sally Bernard of Summit, who is the mother of an autistic child and a member of CAN, which lobbied for the children's environmental health center.Copyright © 2001 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
http://www.bergen.com/news/autismbg200111178.htm
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University of Florida drops two programs in budget cuts

 

University of Florida drops two programs in budget cuts

GAINESVILLE
Posted November 16, 2001, 7:34 AM EST

GAINESVILLE -- University of Florida officials will close the school's inpatient children's mental health unit and the poultry science program as they begin to shave their budget by $22 million.

The cuts are the first for administrators who will cut 3.1 percent of the school's budget this year.

Closing the inpatient children's mental health unit will eliminate twenty direct care position, including therapists, nurses and aides, The Gainesville Sun reported. Half of the unit focuses on developmentally disabled children, including those with autism. The other half helps children with life-threatening diabetes to cope with their illness.

The poultry science program has five professors, 11 employees, and about 3,000 research chickens.

Provost David Colburn said he anticipates the state Legislature to further cut the school's budget during the special session after Thanksgiving.
Copyright 2001 Associated Press
http://orlandosentinel.com/news/yahoo/orlufcuts111601.story?coll=orl%2Dnewsaol%2Dheadlines
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ADHD: a stimulating account

ADHD: a stimulating account
Stimulant Drugs and ADHD: Basic and Clinical Neuroscience Mary V Solanto, Amy F T Arnsten, F Xavier Castellanos, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp 422. $79.95. ISBN 0195133714. Stimulant Drugs and ADHD: Basic and Clinical Neuroscience is a timely addition to the ever growing literature on that most controversial of pharmacotherapies for children and adolescents. Stimulant drugs were introduced in the USA as an adjunct in the treatment of children with inattention and hyperactivity almost 65 years ago. The original observation that central-nervous-system stimulants can have beneficial effects on such childhood behaviour was made by the astute Rhode Island physician Charles Bradley in 1937. The editors of the book are to be commended for their inclusion of his historic paper in this multiauthor volume. Since the time of Bradley's first observation, "thousands of studies have documented the effectiveness of stimulant drugs in the treatment of what is now called Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)". In the USA, stimulants, especially methylphenidate preparations, are now the drugs (indeed therapy) of choice in the management of ADHD. A fair proportion of children or adolescents with ADHD in the USA are treated with methylphenidate or amphetamine, sometimes for several years, whereas in other parts of the world the proportion of individuals treated in this way is much lower. The main purpose of the book is to shed light on the "central question of why and how stimulants exert their therapeutic effects on individuals with ADHD". The book has four sections (Bradley's paper not counted) that deal with: clinical findings; basic and preclinical neuroscience data about dopamine and norepinephrine systems, believed to be critically important for the therapeutic response to stimulants; clinical neuroscience findings from studies of ADHD and of stimulants used in children with ADHD and in adult volunteers; and an integrative chapter written by the three editors. Most of the chapters are engaging, and a few provide much useful information for clinicians and researchers alike. The clinical chapters by Mary Solanto (on the clinical features of ADHD), Laurence Greenhill (on the clinical effects of stimulant medication), and the final, challenging chapter by Solanto, Amy Arnsten, and Xavier Castellanos are outstanding. The excellent chapter on stimulant and non-stimulant effects on catecholamine function and the implications for theories of ADHD is also a joy to read. Much of the remainder of this book is left over to basic and clinical neuroscience, which means that it will be of more interest to the ADHD researcher than to psychiatrists and neurologists working with children and adults with ADHD in their everyday clinical practice. The editors conclude that ADHD encompasses symptoms that are both cognitive (working memory, speeded processing deficits, and, perhaps, inhibition dyscontrol) and behavioural (inattention, hyperactivity, and increased impulsivity). Overactivity is a primary feature of the disorder and not simply the result of inattention or impulsivity (which, of course, might also be taken to mean that AD and HD represent two different disorders, that are often, but not always, comorbid). The dorsolateral regions (and possibly other areas) of the prefrontal cortex are the parts of the brain most likely to be involved in ADHD, but a case can also be made for dysfunctional circuitry to/from/in the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and locus coeruleus. Results from nine twin studies indicate heritability estimates of 0·80 to 0·98, and several independent DNA studies have found weak-to-moderate associations with dopamine-norepinephrine genes. The stimulants exert similar effects in people with and without ADHD, a finding that accords with those of recent genetic studies on families, which indicate that symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are continuously distributed in the general population. The editors suggest that rate-dependency--ie, that the degree of behavioural improvement is a function of the baseline level of behavioural problems--might go some way towards explaining the clinical impression of a paradoxical effect (which does not really exist) of stimulants in individuals with ADHD compared with those without ADHD. Long-term treatment with stimulants does not lead to increased risk of later substance abuse, indeed, there is some evidence to the contrary. The editors present a wealth of information on the central role of dopamine and norepinephrine in mediating the beneficial effects of central stimulants for symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Nevertheless, they end by saying that the main issue about which basic mechanisms are involved, is yet to be resolved. Will this book help clinicians decide whether to increase or decrease the frequency with which they prescribe stimulants for children and adults with ADHD? I don't think so. However, it does provide a sound theoretical and empirical background without which an educated clinical decision either way should not be made. Christopher Gillberg Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Göteborg University, Kungsgatan 12, SE-41119 Göteborg, Sweden, and St George's Hospital Medical School, London, UK
http://www.thelancet.com/search/search.isa
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