SpEd parents and candidates

While sipping coffee and reading the 'news' of the day, a comment on Ish's blog caught my attention. It was an accusation that small bloggers thrust in to the VP hit spike "just dribble it away". The KoKon isn't small per se, but this blog is, and after checking my statcounter and realizing how much of a random jump I got from mentioning S.P.'s glasses - I suppose he has a point. A small one. To be honest, I didn't ask or care for limelight - but was humored by the absurdity of the internet feeding frenzy. I'd bet I could garner more intentionally pandered hits by tagging the post with random statements for free porn. So, rather than 'dribbling away' a post on nonsense... I'll tackle an important subject.

I was curious if Sarah Palin's statement during her speech where she said "with her in office there would an advocate for special needs children within the White House," intrigued parents dealing with those issues. I was a bit surprised in the answers I received.

I have three classmates (that I know of), a roommate from college, and my own little sister who are raising children with Autism. I would have expected them to be delighted about the prospect of someone with first hand knowledge in power. However, as it turns out, while this may benefit the education system, parents of children with Down Syndrome and parents of children with Autism have different struggles. Here are a few statements emailed to me:

"Didn't really phase me, she might have some more sympathy toward developmentally delayed, but don't think it will make a difference in our lives. Downs and muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsey are all in the category of medical problem, that insurance companies cover. Autism is called behavioral, and most insurance companies don't cover treatment, leaving the parents to foot the bill if they want to get a good program going. I mean when they first diagnosed *** the psychologist gave us this big speel about how intense therapy for 40 hours a week was going to give him the best outcome but that kind of therapist was going to cost 30 to 70K per year, out of our pockets. We don't have that kind of money so we got to go through what free services we could get. Unless they are interested in health care reform, and lobbying to get the insurance co. to pitch in, it isn't going to matter."

"Children like Trig are a tiny group compared to autistic children. My daughter has never had even one in her special ed classes and she's 10 now. The numbers are like 1 in 150 for autism, 1 in 1000 for downs before age 40. Compared to when we were in school, where there were only 1 in 10,000 kids with autism. They need to start focusing all of their efforts on figuring out what is going on with the epidemic, and evaluating the vaccine safety and scheduling and coming up with some solutions for what they're going to do with all of these kids when they grow up and leave the school system. That was one of the only reasons I was pulling for Clinton, she was proposing $700 million a year for research and services directly to the autism community."

Sis just sent me a couple links with the note: "I'll have to wait and see what kind of advocacy she's offering, McCain has a good reference from his wife who was a SpEd teacher, Palin's too new to the SpEd community yet to really know anyway. Obama and Hillary were who the Autism groups were supporting."



http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/DisabilityPlanFactSheet.pdf

http://www.johnmccain.com/content/?guid=24dc9c37-e739-4aa3-8a88-ebae650a2f11


Well, there you have it, now at least I'm more informed.