Aug 18, 2017, The Baltimore Sun: Very special, indeed [Editorial] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aegis/opinion/ph-ag-edit-special-needs-students-0818-20170818-story.html
The latest capital improvement program being developed by Harford County Public Schools for the next fiscal year continues what can loosely be called a positive trend.
School officials are planning to spend more than $1 million retrofitting classrooms and other facilities to make them usable for teaching special needs students. That would follow an expenditure of $250,000 in 2015 to create a special classroom at Fallston High School to accommodate students with autism. ...
That's not cheap. School officials say it costs $76,000 to $238,000 per student to place them in programs outside of the system. So every student kept in their home school system could save Harford County Public Schools nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
In the school year that begins after Labor Day in a few weeks, the school system expects students with some degree of autism to total 49 at the elementary level and 12 each at the middle school and high school levels. Keeping that many special needs students in the county school system is a raw savings of between $5.5 million and nearly $17.4 million.
Projections are that incidences of autism will increase. "Prevalence has increased by 6-15 percent each year from 2002 to 2010," according to numbers from the federal government's Centers for Disease Control that were posted on the Autism Society's web site. …
School officials say the system has, however, reduced the number of special needs students placed in outside programs by about 100 kids in the past three years. That's great progress that will get harder and harder to duplicate going.
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Childhood Lost
Children today are noticeably different from previous generations, and the proof is in the news coverage we see every day. This site shows you what’s happening in schools around the world. Children are increasingly disabled and chronically ill, and the education system has to accommodate them. Things we've long associated with autism, like sensory issues, repetitive behaviors, anxiety and lack of social skills, are now problems affecting mainstream students. Blame is predictably placed on bad parenting (otherwise known as trauma from home).
Addressing mental health needs is as important as academics for modern educators. This is an unrecognized disaster. The stories here are about children who can’t learn or behave like children have always been expected to. What childhood has become is a chilling portent for the future of mankind.
Anne Dachel, Media editor, Age of Autism
http://www.ageofautism.com/media/
(John Dachel, Tech. assist.)
CHECK OUT MY SUBSTACK:
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What will happen in another 4 years? How can we go on like this? This is a national (and international) problem of monumental proportions. We have an entire new class of children who cannot be accommodated by the system: many are manifestly neurologically impaired. Meanwhile, the government and the medical profession sleep on regardless.
John Stone,
UK media editor, Age of Autism
The generation of American children born after 1990 are arguably the sickest generation in the history of our country.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It seemed to me that with rising autism prevalence, you’d also see rising autism costs to society, and it turns out, the costs are catastrophic.
They calculated that in 2015 autism cost the United States $268 billion and they projected that if autism continues at its current rate, we’re looking at one trillion dollars a year in autism costs by 2025, so within five years.
Toby Rogers, PhD, Political economist
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