More on Autism

 

 I'm very sympathetic to kids with autism and their parents, but this system is nuts.

This year, the New York City public schools have budgeted nearly $824 million to pay private schools to educate children the system can’t help, up from a little over $82 million a decade ago—in part because of the national autism explosion, a phenomenon nobody can explain...

Four years ago, when the city was spending $13 million annually on special-education lawsuits, the then–school chancellor Harold Levy pleaded with the President’s Commission on Special Education to intervene to stop what he called “abuse of the system.” “Parents see the opportunity for their child’s private education to be paid for at public expense,” he railed. Last year, the city paid out $53 million on those same special-ed lawsuits.

Critics of the current system—and there are many in the education community—contend that most of those payouts are awarded to parents who are deft at working the system and affluent enough to pay $450-an-hour lawyers on the gamble, a pretty good one, that they’ll get it back. Even current school chancellor Joel Klein admits as much: “No doubt there are inequities based on people’s ability to navigate the legal system,” he says.

Most cities and suburbs, including Westchester and Long Island districts, manage to offer some semblance of appropriate education in the public schools. Parents of kids with autism outside New York can and do sue, but as likely as not, they lose. “You go to suburban school districts and it’s a rarity they can’t provide the right services for a child,” says Regina Skyer, a social worker turned special- education attorney.

New York is renowned as one of the only places in the country where parents who buy legal help can count on winning. Usually, lawyers never even have to prove the failings of the schools themselves, because the Board of Ed has missed some basic step, like putting together an education plan for the child (also required by law). Skyer ticks off a few other typical bureaucratic screwups: “They don’t hold meetings, they lose files, they don’t have mandated people at meetings, placements are not made in suitable groups.” Usually the educators who attend the legal hearings have never met the children.

In the past two years, the city has opted to pay 50 settlements of over $100,000 apiece—almost all for autistic kids—instead of fighting to the death in court. The city comptroller’s office rejected just one: a settlement of $387,400, for one year of therapy. “It’s not just ‘Hire a lawyer and win,’” says John Farago, a hearing officer who issues decisions on autism cases. “It’s ‘Ask for a hearing and win.’ ”...

As evidence of progress in public schools, Klein also points to 46 new prekindergarten autism classes and the year-old New York Center for Autism Charter School, the city’s first such program, on East 101st Street. There, teachers deploy behavioral drills, hundreds of them every week, to train seventeen autistic children to stop flapping their hands, or ask to go to the bathroom instead of in a diaper. They get rewards—some pretzels, some Gameboy time—for new tasks mastered. The school gets $62,000 a year in public funding per student and raises an additional $20,000 each from charity benefits like Jon Stewart’s recent “Night of Too Many Stars” at the Beacon Theater, which attracted comics from Sacha Baron Cohen to Steve Carell.

“The idea that parents should sue—it’s going to break the bank,” says the charter school’s co-founder Ilene Lainer, a labor-management lawyer from the Upper West Side and mother of an autistic 9-year-old. “The answer is to create programs that are publicly run.” Lainer knows the alternative all too well. Up until her son Ari landed a spot in a state-approved private school this year (he lost the lottery for a place in Lainer’s school), he spent five years alternating between her living room and a private academy in New Jersey. How did Lainer pay? She sued the city.

 

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