Autism, Neurotypical Children, and the Funding of Our Schools

By Lance Winslow

Our current public educational system is not set up to deal with Autistic Children and in trying to do so it is further hurting their school district budgets. You see the Autistic Children really need more one-on-one assistance; help that school districts with 20 to 30 average class sizes simply cannot do.

Without the proper special assistance we are not helping the autistic kids and there will be dire consequences down the road from this. Additionally each year more autistic children are born you see and they need more upfront assistance for longer. One parent writes;

�Through our advocacy, my son is enrolled in an independent school with six other children (all who are neurotypical). Still, I see that he needs a lot of private tutoring and we're considering starting a non-profit organization, where autistic children can receive that 1:1 support. (There should also be opportunities to socialize so I'm thinking about working in concert with this independent school � perhaps where the non-profit would be governed by them.). It seems difficult to launch a non-profit where the first person to benefit would be a family member. And it is doubtful that we can even raise enough money for him. The school will donate a room but we need money to pay the teacher/therapists.�

One can certainly see the dilemmas here, yet something must be done to solve these issues. Perhaps you have a similar issue or have considered a way to help in such a situation. Maybe you have an answer on this issue; this is definitely one of those problems that can be solved thru the proper use of resources and working with better efficiencies of our current resources. So, consider all this in 2006.

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