Thursday, February 28, 2008
Queens College Center on Autism and Related Disabilities 1st ANNUAL CONFERENCE MAY 3, 2008
Queens College Center on Autism andRelated Disabilities1st ANNUAL CONFERENCECREATING PBS CONTEXTS AT SCHOOL AND HOME FOR CHILDREN ON THE AUTISMSPECTRUMMAY 3, 20089:30 - 1:00KEYNOTE ADDRESSDr. Edward CarrLeading ProfessorStony Brook University"Repairing and Enhancing Quality of Life: Achievable and Hopeful"LOCATION:Queens CollegeRosenthal LibraryRoom 230(Go to main gate on Kissena Blvd. for parking instructions)Schedule9:30 - 10:10 Registration and refreshments10:15 - 11:15 Keynote: Dr. Edward Carr11:30 - 1:00 Breakout sessions: choose one1. Thinking in PBS: Approaching Problem Behavior Through the Lens ofPBSPresenter: Christopher Oliva, Ph.D.This training will focus on understanding and addressing problembehavior of children with autism in educational settings from theperspective of positive behavior support. General PBS strategies, aswell as formal assessment based strategies, will be explored. Caseexamples will be used to demonstrate effective interventions.2. Guidelines for a PBS Classroom: Lessons from the FieldPresenter: Angela Mouzakitis, MsEd, BCBAThe purpose of this workshop is to share classroom guidelines identifiedas necessary to create a "positive behavior supports" classroom. Theseguidelines have been identified through hands-on work, observation andconsultation with classrooms that serve children with autism. Goals ofthe workshop are to provide guidelines for a PBS classroom, discuss andprovide examples of the guidelines in action, and to provideprofessionals with a system for managing and monitoring guidelines,providing feedback to teacher, in order to improve classroom practice.3. Parent Strategies for Supporting Language and Positive Behavior inDaily Family RoutinesPresenter: Peishi Wang, Ph.D., BCBAThis session will explore a variety of parent-implemented interventionsappropriate in natural environments with young children with ASD. Focuswill be on teaching communication skills and increasing participation infamily activities.4. Friendships and Beyond: Developing Social Skills in Students withASDPresenter: Nicole Weidenbaum, MsEd., SASSuccess within home, school, and community settings, weighs heavily onthe development of social skills. This presentation will focus on thesocial skills needed for students to be successful in an inclusiveschool setting, as well as teaching techniques that are applicableacross a broad range of skill levels and settings.5. Make It Fun and I'll Show Up: Moving towards naturally occurringreinforcementPresenter: Randy Horowitz, MsEd, SASThis presentation will describe ways in which parents and teachers canestablish (and maintain) themselves as reinforcing stimuli in theeducation of individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.The use of antecedent based strategies to prevent problem behavior willbe described in the context of designing effective behavior supportplans.6. "We're all working really hard - but these PBS strategies are notworking!"Presenter: Sara Woolf, M.ADoes this sound too familiar? If so, come to this session to learn aboutteam process strategies and skills that have been identified as criticalin establishing successful home-school partnerships -- and developinglasting PBS outcomes. The session will focus on ways to apply "team bestpractices" as discussed by select school-family teams and in currentliterature from the fields of Special Education, Educational Leadership,and PBS/ABA.CONFERENCE PRE-REGISTRATIONREGISTRANT INFORMATIONNameJob Title/RoleSchool/AgencyAddressCity StateZip CodePhone EmailBREAKOUT SESSION CHOICE (SELECT ONE)___ 1: Thinking in PBS ___ 4: Friendshipsand Beyond___ 2: Lessons from the Field ___ 5: Make it Fun___ 3: Family Routines ___ 6: We're AllWorking Hard...!REGISTRATION FEESThis conference is funded through a grant from the Center for Autism andRelated Disabilities, University at Albany, and the NYS EducationDepartment, Office of Vocational and Educational Services forIndividuals with Disabilities.The registration fee is $10.00. Payment must accompany registration.Please return registration form and payment (made out to QC-CARD) to:Dr. Fredda Brown, Project DirectorEducational and Community ProgramsQueens College63-50 Kissena Blvd.Flushing NY 11367
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know
By David Wolman 02.25.08 6:00 PM
Amanda Baggs is at the forefront of a movement that’s forcing researchers to rethink autism. Photo: Jessica Dimmock
FEATURE
A Researcher's Puzzles Point to the Differences in the Autistic Brain
The YouTube clip opens with a woman facing away from the camera, rocking back and forth, flapping her hands awkwardly, and emitting an eerie hum. She then performs strange repetitive behaviors: slapping a piece of paper against a window, running a hand lengthwise over a computer keyboard, twisting the knob of a drawer. She bats a necklace with her hand and nuzzles her face against the pages of a book. And you find yourself thinking: Who's shooting this footage of the handicapped lady, and why do I always get sucked into watching the latest viral video?
But then the words "A Translation" appear on a black screen, and for the next five minutes, 27-year-old Amanda Baggs — who is autistic and doesn't speak — describes in vivid and articulate terms what's going on inside her head as she carries out these seemingly bizarre actions. In a synthesized voice generated by a software application, she explains that touching, tasting, and smelling allow her to have a "constant conversation" with her surroundings. These forms of nonverbal stimuli constitute her "native language," Baggs explains, and are no better or worse than spoken language. Yet her failure to speak is seen as a deficit, she says, while other people's failure to learn her language is seen as natural and acceptable.
And you find yourself thinking: She might have a point.
In My Language
Baggs lives in a public housing project for the elderly and handicapped near downtown Burlington, Vermont. She has short black hair, a pointy nose, and round glasses. She usually wears a T-shirt and baggy pants, and she spends a scary amount of time — day and night — on the Internet: blogging, hanging out in Second Life, and corresponding with her autie and aspie friends. (For the uninitiated, that's autistic and Asperger's.)
On a blustery afternoon, Baggs reclines on a red futon in the apartment of her neighbor (and best friend). She has a gray travel pillow wrapped around her neck, a keyboard resting on her lap, and a DynaVox VMax computer propped against her legs.
Like many people with autism, Baggs doesn't like to look you in the eye and needs help with tasks like preparing a meal and taking a shower. In conversation she'll occasionally grunt or sigh, but she stopped speaking altogether in her early twenties. Instead, she types 120 words a minute, which the DynaVox then translates into a synthesized female voice that sounds like a deadpan British schoolteacher.
The YouTube post, she says, was a political statement, designed to call attention to people's tendency to underestimate autistics. It wasn't her first video post, but this one took off. "When the number of viewers began to climb, I got scared out of my mind," Baggs says. As the hit count neared 100,000, her blog was flooded. At 200,000, scientists were inviting her to visit their labs. By 300,000, the TV people came calling, hearts warmed by the story of a young woman's fiery spirit and the rare glimpse into what has long been regarded as the solitary imprisonment of the autistic mind. "I've said a million times that I'm not trapped in my own world,'" Baggs says. "Yet what do most of these news stories lead with? Saying exactly that."
Photo: Jessica Dimmock
I tell her that I asked one of the world's leading authorities on autism to check out the video. The expert's opinion: Baggs must have had outside help creating it, perhaps from one of her caregivers. Her inability to talk, coupled with repetitive behaviors, lack of eye contact, and the need for assistance with everyday tasks are telltale signs of severe autism. Among all autistics, 75 percent are expected to score in the mentally retarded range on standard intelligence tests — that's an IQ of 70 or less.
People like Baggs fall at one end of an array of developmental syndromes known as autism spectrum disorders. The spectrum ranges from someone with severe disability and cognitive impairment to the socially awkward eccentric with Asperger's syndrome.
After I explain the scientist's doubts, Baggs grunts, and her mouth forms just a hint of a smirk as she lets loose a salvo on the keyboard. No one helped her shoot the video, edit it, and upload it to YouTube. She used a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, a digital camera that can record up to 90 seconds of video (she has since upgraded). She then patched the footage together using the editing programs RAD Video Tools, VirtualDub, and DivXLand Media Subtitler. "My care provider wouldn't even know how to work the software," she says.
Baggs is part of an increasingly visible and highly networked community of autistics. Over the past decade, this group has benefited enormously from the Internet as well as innovations like type-to-speech software. Baggs may never have considered herself trapped in her own world, but thanks to technology, she can communicate with the same speed and specificity as someone using spoken language.
Photo: Jessica Dimmock
Autistics like Baggs are now leading a nascent civil rights movement. "I remember in '99," she says, "seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were and wished there was something like that for autism. Now there is." The message: We're here. We're weird. Get used to it.
This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn't be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.
A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. "If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago," says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, "I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong."
Photo: Jessica Dimmock
Seventy years ago, a Baltimore psychiatrist named Leo Kanner began recording observations about children in his clinic who exhibited "fascinating peculiarities." Just as Kanner's landmark paper was about to be published, a pediatrician in Vienna named Hans Asperger was putting the finishing touches on a report about a similar patient population. Both men, independently, used the same word to describe and define the condition: autist, or autism, from the Greek autos, meaning self.
The children had very real deficits, especially when it came to the "failure to be integrated in a social group" (Asperger) or the inborn inability to form "affective contact" with other people (Kanner). The two doctors' other observations about language impairment, repetitive behaviors, and the desire for sameness still form much of the basis of autism diagnoses in the 21st century.
On the matter of autistic intelligence, Kanner spoke of an array of mental skills, "islets of ability" — vocabulary, memory, and problem-solving that "bespeak good intelligence." Asperger, too, was struck by "a particular originality of thought and experience." Yet over the years, those islets attracted scientific interest only when they were amazing — savant-level capabilities in areas such as music, mathematics, and drawing. For the millions of people with autism who weren't savants, the general view was that their condition was tragic, their brainpower lacking.
The test typically used to substantiate this view relies heavily on language, social interaction, and cultural knowledge — areas that autistic people, by definition, find difficult. About six years ago, Meredyth Goldberg Edelson, a professor of psychology at Willamette University in Oregon, reviewed 215 articles published over the past 71 years, all making or referring to this link between autism and mental retardation. She found that most of the papers (74 percent) lacked their own research data to back up the assumption. Thirty-nine percent of the articles weren't based on any data, and even the more rigorous studies often used questionable measures of intelligence. "Are the majority of autistics mentally retarded?" Goldberg Edelson asks. "Personally, I don't think they are, but we don't have the data to answer that."
Mike Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at UC San Francisco, says the notion that 75 percent of autistic people are mentally retarded is "incredibly wrong and destructive." He has worked with a number of autistic children, many of whom are nonverbal and would have been plunked into the low-functioning category. "We label them as retarded because they can't express what they know," and then, as they grow older, we accept that they "can't do much beyond sit in the back of a warehouse somewhere and stuff letters in envelopes."
The irony is that this dearth of data persists even as autism receives an avalanche of attention. Organizations such as Autism Speaks advocate for research and resources. Celebrity parents like Toni Braxton, Ed Asner, and Jenny McCarthy get high-profile coverage on talk shows and TV news magazines. Newsweeklies raise fears of an autism epidemic. But is there an epidemic? There's certainly the perception of one. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of every 150 8-year-old children (in the areas of the US most recently studied) has an autism spectrum disorder, a prevalence much higher than in decades past, when the rate was thought to be in the range of four or five cases per 10,000 children. But no one knows whether this apparent explosion of cases is due to an actual rise in autism, changing diagnostic criteria, inconsistent survey techniques, or some combination of the three.
In his original paper in 1943, Kanner wrote that while many of the children he examined "were at one time or another looked upon as feebleminded, they are all unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities." Sixty-five years later, though, little is known about those potentialities. As one researcher told me, "There's no money in the field for looking at differences" in the autistic brain. "But if you talk about trying to fix a problem — then the funding comes."
On the outskirts of Montreal sits a brick monolith, the Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies. Once one of Canada's most notorious asylums, it now has a small number of resident psychiatric patients, but most of the space has been converted into clinics and research facilities.
One of the leading researchers here is Laurent Mottron, 55, a psychiatrist specializing in autism. Mottron, who grew up in postwar France, had a tough childhood. His family had a history of schizophrenia and Tourette syndrome, and he probably has what today would be diagnosed as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Naturally, he went into psychiatry. By the early '80s, Mottron was doing clinical work at a school in Tours that catered to children with sensory impairment, including autism. "The view then," Mottron says, "was that these children could be reeled back to normalcy with play therapy and work on the parents' relationships" — a gentle way of saying that the parents, especially the mother, were to blame. (The theory that emotionally distant "refrigerator mothers" caused autism had by then been rejected in the US, but in France and many other countries, the view lingered.)
After only a few weeks on the job, Mottron decided the theories were crap. "These children were just of another kind," he says. "You couldn't turn someone autistic or make someone not autistic. It was hardwired." In 1986, Mottron began working with an autistic man who would later become known in the scientific literature as "E.C." A draftsman who specialized in mechanical drawings, E.C. had incredible savant skills in 3-D drawing. He could rotate objects in his mind and make technical drawings without the need for a single revision. After two years of working with E.C., Mottron made his second breakthrough — not about autistics this time but about the rest of us: People with standard-issue brains — so-called neurotypicals — don't have the perceptual abilities to do what E.C. could do. "It's just inconsistent with how our brains work," Mottron says.
From that day forward, he decided to challenge the disease model underlying most autism research. "I wanted to go as far as I could to show that their perception — their brains — are totally different." Not damaged. Not dysfunctional. Just different.
By the mid-1990s, Mottron was a faculty member at the University of Montreal, where he began publishing papers on "atypicalities of perception" in autistic subjects. When performing certain mental tasks — especially when tapping visual, spatial, and auditory functions — autistics have shown superior performance compared with neurotypicals. Call it the upside of autism. Dozens of studies — Mottron's and others — have demonstrated that people with autism spectrum disorder have a number of strengths: a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic recall, and various superior memory skills.
Yet most scientists who come across these skills classify them as "anomalous peaks of ability," set them aside, and return to the questions that drive most research: What's wrong with the autistic brain? Can we find the genes responsible so that we can someday cure it? Is there a unifying theory of autism? With severe autistics, cognitive strengths are even more apt to be overlooked because these individuals have such obvious deficits and are so hard to test. People like Baggs don't speak, others may run out of the room, and still others might not be able to hold a pencil. And besides, if 75 percent of them are mentally retarded, well, why bother?
Mottron draws a parallel with homosexuality. Until 1974, psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, described being gay as a mental illness. Someday, Mottron says, we'll look back on today's ideas about autism with the same sense of shame that we now feel when talking about psychology's pre-1974 views on sexuality. "We want to break the idea that autism should definitely be suppressed," he says.
Michelle Dawson, right, is autistic. She's also a researcher in the lab of Laurent Mottron (left), a psychiatrist who specializes in autism. Photo: Jessica Dimmock
Michelle Dawson doesn't drive or cook. Public transit overwhelms her, and face-to-face interaction is an ordeal. She was employed as a postal worker in 1998 when she "came out of the closet" with her diagnosis of autism, which she received in the early '90s. After that, she claims, Canada Post harassed her to such a degree that she was forced to take a permanent leave of absence, starting in 2002. (Canada Post says Dawson was treated fairly.) To fight back, she went on an information-devouring rampage. "There's such a variety of human behavior. Why is my kind wrong?" she asks. She eventually began scouring the libraries of McGill University in Montreal to delve into the autism literature. She searched out journal articles using the online catalog and sat on the floor reading studies among the stacks.
Dawson, like Baggs, has become a reluctant spokesperson for this new view of autism. Both are prolific bloggers and correspond constantly with scientists, parents' groups, medical institutions, the courts, journalists, and anyone else who'll listen to their stories of how autistics are mistreated. Baggs has been using YouTube to make her point; Dawson's weapon is science.
In 2001, Dawson contacted Mottron, figuring that his clinic might help improve the quality of her life. Mottron tried to give her some advice on navigating the neurotypical world, but his tips on how to handle banking, shopping, and buses didn't help. After meeting with her a few times, Mottron began to suspect that what Dawson really needed was a sense of purpose. In 2003, he handed her one of his in-progress journal articles and asked her to copy-edit the grammar. So Dawson started reading. "I criticized his science almost immediately," she says.
Encouraged by Dawson's interest, Mottron sent her other papers. She responded with written critiques of his work. Then one day in early 2003, she called with a question. "I asked: How did they control for attention in that fMRI face study?' That caught his attention." Dawson had flagged an error that Mottron says most postdocs would have missed. He was impressed, and over the next few months he sought Dawson's input on other technical questions. Eventually, he invited her to collaborate with his research group, despite the fact that her only academic credential was a high school diploma.
Dawson has an incredible memory, but she's not a savant. What makes her unique, Mottron says, is her gift for scientific analysis — the way she can sniff through methodologies and statistical manipulation, hunting down tiny errors and weak links in logic.
Last summer, the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science published a study titled "The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence." The lead author was Michelle Dawson. The paper argues that autistic smarts have been underestimated because the tools for assessing intelligence depend on techniques ill-suited to autistics. The researchers administered two different intelligence tests to 51 children and adults diagnosed with autism and to 43 non-autistic children and adults.
The first test, known as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, has helped solidify the notion of peaks of ability amid otherwise pervasive mental retardation among autistics. The other test is Raven's Progressive Matrices, which requires neither a race against the clock nor a proctor breathing down your neck. The Raven is considered as reliable as the Wechsler, but the Wechsler is far more commonly used. Perhaps that's because it requires less effort for the average test taker. Raven measures abstract reasoning — "effortful" operations like spotting patterns or solving geometric puzzles. In contrast, much of the Wechsler assesses crystallized skills like acquired vocabulary, making correct change, or knowing that milk goes in the fridge and cereal in the cupboard — learned information that most people intuit or recall almost automatically.
What the researchers found was that while non-autistic subjects scored just about the same — a little above average — on both tests, the autistic group scored much better on the Raven. Two individuals' scores swung from the mentally retarded range to the 94th percentile. More significantly, the subset of autistic children in the study scored roughly 30 percentile points higher on the Raven than they did on the more language-dependent Wechsler, pulling all but a couple of them out of the range for mental retardation.
A number of scientists shrugged off the results — of course autistics would do better on nonverbal tests. But Dawson and her coauthors saw something more. The "peaks of ability" on the Wechsler correlated strongly with the average scores on the Raven. The finding suggests the Wechsler scores give only a glimpse of the autistics' intelligence, whereas the Raven — the gold standard of fluid intelligence testing — reveals the true, or at least truer, level of general intelligence.
Yet to a remarkable degree, scientists conducting cognitive evaluations continue to use tests which presume that people who can't communicate the answer don't know the answer. The question is: Why? Greg Allen, an assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says that although most researchers know the Wechsler doesn't provide a good assessment of people with autism, there's pressure to use the test anyway. "Say you're submitting a grant to study autistic people by comparing them to a control group," he says. "The first question that comes up is: Did you control for IQ? Matching people on IQ is meant to clean up the methodology, but I think it can also end up damaging the study."
And that hurts autistic people, Dawson says. She makes a comparison with blindness. Of course blind people have a disability and need special accommodation. But you wouldn't give a blind person a test heavily dependent on vision and interpret their poor score as an accurate measure of intelligence. Mottron is unequivocal: Because of recent research, especially the Raven paper, it's clearer than ever that so-called low-functioning people like Amanda Baggs are more intelligent than once presumed.The Dawson paper was hardly conclusive, but it generated buzz among scientists and the media. Mottron's team is now collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital's Zeffiro, a neuroimaging expert, to dig deeper. Zeffiro and company are looking for variable types of mental processing without asking, what's wrong with this brain? Their first study compares fMRI results from autistic and control subjects whose brains were imaged while they performed the Raven test. The group is currently crunching numbers for publication, and the study looks both perplexing and promising.
Surprisingly, they didn't find any variability in which parts of the brain lit up when subjects performed the tasks. "We thought we'd see different patterns of activation," Zeffiro says, "but it looks like the similarities outweigh the dissimilarities." When they examined participants' Raven scores together with response times, however, they noticed something odd. The two groups had the same error rates, but as an aggregate, the autistics completed the tasks 40 percent faster than the non-autistics. "They spent less time coming up with the same number of right answers. The only explanation we can see right now," Zeffiro says, is that autistic brains working on this set of tasks "seem to be engaged at a higher level of efficiency." That may have to do with greater connectivity within an area or areas of the brain. He and other researchers are already exploring this hypothesis using diffusion tensor imaging, which measures the density of brain wiring.
But critics of the difference model reject the whole idea that autism is merely another example of neuro-diversity. After all, being able to plan your meals for the week or ask for directions bespeak important forms of intelligence. "If you pretend the areas that are troubled aren't there, you miss important aspects of the person," says Fred Volkmar, director of Yale's Child Study Center.
In the vast majority of journal articles, autism is referred to as a disorder, and the majority of neuro-psychiatric experts will tell you that the description fits — something is wrong with the autistic brain. UCSF's Merzenich, who agrees that conventional intelligence-testing tools are misleading, still doesn't think the difference model makes sense. Many autistics are probably smarter than we think, he says. But there's little question that more severe autism is characterized by what Merzenich terms "grossly abnormal" brain development that can lead to a "catastrophic end state." Denying this reality, he says, is misguided. Yale's Volkmar likens it to telling a physically disabled person: "You don't need a wheelchair. Walk!"
Meanwhile parents, educators, and autism advocates worry that focusing on the latent abilities and intelligence of autistic people may eventually lead to cuts in funding both for research into a cure and services provided by government. As one mother of an autistic boy told me, "There's no question that my son needs treatment and a cure."
Back in Burlington, Baggs is cueing up another YouTube clip. She angles her computer screen so I can see it. Set to the soundtrack of Queen's "Under Pressure," it's a montage of close-up videos showing behaviors like pen clicking, thumb twiddling, and finger tapping. The message: Why are some stress-related behaviors socially permissible, while others — like the rocking bodies and flapping arms commonly associated with autism — are not? Hit count for the video at last check: 80,000 and climbing.
Should autism be treated? Yes, says Baggs, it should be treated with respect. "People aren't interested in us functioning with the brains we have," she says, because autism is considered to be outside the range of normal variability. "I don't fit the stereotype of autism. But who does?" she asks, hammering especially hard on the keyboard. "The definition of autism is so fluid and changing every few years." What's exciting, she says, is that Mottron and other scientists have "found universal strengths where others usually look for universal deficits." Neuro-cognitive science, she says, is finally catching up to what she and many other adults with autism have been saying all along.
Baggs is working on some new videos. One project is tentatively titled "Am I a Person Yet?" She'll explore communication, empathy, self-reflection — core elements of the human experience that have at times been used to define personhood itself. And at various points during the clip, she'll ask: "Am I a person yet?" It's a provocative idea, and you might find yourself thinking: She has a point.
David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) wrote about a terrorist attack response drill in issue 16.02.
Amanda Baggs is at the forefront of a movement that’s forcing researchers to rethink autism. Photo: Jessica Dimmock
FEATURE
A Researcher's Puzzles Point to the Differences in the Autistic Brain
The YouTube clip opens with a woman facing away from the camera, rocking back and forth, flapping her hands awkwardly, and emitting an eerie hum. She then performs strange repetitive behaviors: slapping a piece of paper against a window, running a hand lengthwise over a computer keyboard, twisting the knob of a drawer. She bats a necklace with her hand and nuzzles her face against the pages of a book. And you find yourself thinking: Who's shooting this footage of the handicapped lady, and why do I always get sucked into watching the latest viral video?
But then the words "A Translation" appear on a black screen, and for the next five minutes, 27-year-old Amanda Baggs — who is autistic and doesn't speak — describes in vivid and articulate terms what's going on inside her head as she carries out these seemingly bizarre actions. In a synthesized voice generated by a software application, she explains that touching, tasting, and smelling allow her to have a "constant conversation" with her surroundings. These forms of nonverbal stimuli constitute her "native language," Baggs explains, and are no better or worse than spoken language. Yet her failure to speak is seen as a deficit, she says, while other people's failure to learn her language is seen as natural and acceptable.
And you find yourself thinking: She might have a point.
In My Language
Baggs lives in a public housing project for the elderly and handicapped near downtown Burlington, Vermont. She has short black hair, a pointy nose, and round glasses. She usually wears a T-shirt and baggy pants, and she spends a scary amount of time — day and night — on the Internet: blogging, hanging out in Second Life, and corresponding with her autie and aspie friends. (For the uninitiated, that's autistic and Asperger's.)
On a blustery afternoon, Baggs reclines on a red futon in the apartment of her neighbor (and best friend). She has a gray travel pillow wrapped around her neck, a keyboard resting on her lap, and a DynaVox VMax computer propped against her legs.
Like many people with autism, Baggs doesn't like to look you in the eye and needs help with tasks like preparing a meal and taking a shower. In conversation she'll occasionally grunt or sigh, but she stopped speaking altogether in her early twenties. Instead, she types 120 words a minute, which the DynaVox then translates into a synthesized female voice that sounds like a deadpan British schoolteacher.
The YouTube post, she says, was a political statement, designed to call attention to people's tendency to underestimate autistics. It wasn't her first video post, but this one took off. "When the number of viewers began to climb, I got scared out of my mind," Baggs says. As the hit count neared 100,000, her blog was flooded. At 200,000, scientists were inviting her to visit their labs. By 300,000, the TV people came calling, hearts warmed by the story of a young woman's fiery spirit and the rare glimpse into what has long been regarded as the solitary imprisonment of the autistic mind. "I've said a million times that I'm not trapped in my own world,'" Baggs says. "Yet what do most of these news stories lead with? Saying exactly that."
Photo: Jessica Dimmock
I tell her that I asked one of the world's leading authorities on autism to check out the video. The expert's opinion: Baggs must have had outside help creating it, perhaps from one of her caregivers. Her inability to talk, coupled with repetitive behaviors, lack of eye contact, and the need for assistance with everyday tasks are telltale signs of severe autism. Among all autistics, 75 percent are expected to score in the mentally retarded range on standard intelligence tests — that's an IQ of 70 or less.
People like Baggs fall at one end of an array of developmental syndromes known as autism spectrum disorders. The spectrum ranges from someone with severe disability and cognitive impairment to the socially awkward eccentric with Asperger's syndrome.
After I explain the scientist's doubts, Baggs grunts, and her mouth forms just a hint of a smirk as she lets loose a salvo on the keyboard. No one helped her shoot the video, edit it, and upload it to YouTube. She used a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, a digital camera that can record up to 90 seconds of video (she has since upgraded). She then patched the footage together using the editing programs RAD Video Tools, VirtualDub, and DivXLand Media Subtitler. "My care provider wouldn't even know how to work the software," she says.
Baggs is part of an increasingly visible and highly networked community of autistics. Over the past decade, this group has benefited enormously from the Internet as well as innovations like type-to-speech software. Baggs may never have considered herself trapped in her own world, but thanks to technology, she can communicate with the same speed and specificity as someone using spoken language.
Photo: Jessica Dimmock
Autistics like Baggs are now leading a nascent civil rights movement. "I remember in '99," she says, "seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were and wished there was something like that for autism. Now there is." The message: We're here. We're weird. Get used to it.
This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn't be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.
A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. "If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago," says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, "I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong."
Photo: Jessica Dimmock
Seventy years ago, a Baltimore psychiatrist named Leo Kanner began recording observations about children in his clinic who exhibited "fascinating peculiarities." Just as Kanner's landmark paper was about to be published, a pediatrician in Vienna named Hans Asperger was putting the finishing touches on a report about a similar patient population. Both men, independently, used the same word to describe and define the condition: autist, or autism, from the Greek autos, meaning self.
The children had very real deficits, especially when it came to the "failure to be integrated in a social group" (Asperger) or the inborn inability to form "affective contact" with other people (Kanner). The two doctors' other observations about language impairment, repetitive behaviors, and the desire for sameness still form much of the basis of autism diagnoses in the 21st century.
On the matter of autistic intelligence, Kanner spoke of an array of mental skills, "islets of ability" — vocabulary, memory, and problem-solving that "bespeak good intelligence." Asperger, too, was struck by "a particular originality of thought and experience." Yet over the years, those islets attracted scientific interest only when they were amazing — savant-level capabilities in areas such as music, mathematics, and drawing. For the millions of people with autism who weren't savants, the general view was that their condition was tragic, their brainpower lacking.
The test typically used to substantiate this view relies heavily on language, social interaction, and cultural knowledge — areas that autistic people, by definition, find difficult. About six years ago, Meredyth Goldberg Edelson, a professor of psychology at Willamette University in Oregon, reviewed 215 articles published over the past 71 years, all making or referring to this link between autism and mental retardation. She found that most of the papers (74 percent) lacked their own research data to back up the assumption. Thirty-nine percent of the articles weren't based on any data, and even the more rigorous studies often used questionable measures of intelligence. "Are the majority of autistics mentally retarded?" Goldberg Edelson asks. "Personally, I don't think they are, but we don't have the data to answer that."
Mike Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at UC San Francisco, says the notion that 75 percent of autistic people are mentally retarded is "incredibly wrong and destructive." He has worked with a number of autistic children, many of whom are nonverbal and would have been plunked into the low-functioning category. "We label them as retarded because they can't express what they know," and then, as they grow older, we accept that they "can't do much beyond sit in the back of a warehouse somewhere and stuff letters in envelopes."
The irony is that this dearth of data persists even as autism receives an avalanche of attention. Organizations such as Autism Speaks advocate for research and resources. Celebrity parents like Toni Braxton, Ed Asner, and Jenny McCarthy get high-profile coverage on talk shows and TV news magazines. Newsweeklies raise fears of an autism epidemic. But is there an epidemic? There's certainly the perception of one. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of every 150 8-year-old children (in the areas of the US most recently studied) has an autism spectrum disorder, a prevalence much higher than in decades past, when the rate was thought to be in the range of four or five cases per 10,000 children. But no one knows whether this apparent explosion of cases is due to an actual rise in autism, changing diagnostic criteria, inconsistent survey techniques, or some combination of the three.
In his original paper in 1943, Kanner wrote that while many of the children he examined "were at one time or another looked upon as feebleminded, they are all unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities." Sixty-five years later, though, little is known about those potentialities. As one researcher told me, "There's no money in the field for looking at differences" in the autistic brain. "But if you talk about trying to fix a problem — then the funding comes."
On the outskirts of Montreal sits a brick monolith, the Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies. Once one of Canada's most notorious asylums, it now has a small number of resident psychiatric patients, but most of the space has been converted into clinics and research facilities.
One of the leading researchers here is Laurent Mottron, 55, a psychiatrist specializing in autism. Mottron, who grew up in postwar France, had a tough childhood. His family had a history of schizophrenia and Tourette syndrome, and he probably has what today would be diagnosed as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Naturally, he went into psychiatry. By the early '80s, Mottron was doing clinical work at a school in Tours that catered to children with sensory impairment, including autism. "The view then," Mottron says, "was that these children could be reeled back to normalcy with play therapy and work on the parents' relationships" — a gentle way of saying that the parents, especially the mother, were to blame. (The theory that emotionally distant "refrigerator mothers" caused autism had by then been rejected in the US, but in France and many other countries, the view lingered.)
After only a few weeks on the job, Mottron decided the theories were crap. "These children were just of another kind," he says. "You couldn't turn someone autistic or make someone not autistic. It was hardwired." In 1986, Mottron began working with an autistic man who would later become known in the scientific literature as "E.C." A draftsman who specialized in mechanical drawings, E.C. had incredible savant skills in 3-D drawing. He could rotate objects in his mind and make technical drawings without the need for a single revision. After two years of working with E.C., Mottron made his second breakthrough — not about autistics this time but about the rest of us: People with standard-issue brains — so-called neurotypicals — don't have the perceptual abilities to do what E.C. could do. "It's just inconsistent with how our brains work," Mottron says.
From that day forward, he decided to challenge the disease model underlying most autism research. "I wanted to go as far as I could to show that their perception — their brains — are totally different." Not damaged. Not dysfunctional. Just different.
By the mid-1990s, Mottron was a faculty member at the University of Montreal, where he began publishing papers on "atypicalities of perception" in autistic subjects. When performing certain mental tasks — especially when tapping visual, spatial, and auditory functions — autistics have shown superior performance compared with neurotypicals. Call it the upside of autism. Dozens of studies — Mottron's and others — have demonstrated that people with autism spectrum disorder have a number of strengths: a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic recall, and various superior memory skills.
Yet most scientists who come across these skills classify them as "anomalous peaks of ability," set them aside, and return to the questions that drive most research: What's wrong with the autistic brain? Can we find the genes responsible so that we can someday cure it? Is there a unifying theory of autism? With severe autistics, cognitive strengths are even more apt to be overlooked because these individuals have such obvious deficits and are so hard to test. People like Baggs don't speak, others may run out of the room, and still others might not be able to hold a pencil. And besides, if 75 percent of them are mentally retarded, well, why bother?
Mottron draws a parallel with homosexuality. Until 1974, psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, described being gay as a mental illness. Someday, Mottron says, we'll look back on today's ideas about autism with the same sense of shame that we now feel when talking about psychology's pre-1974 views on sexuality. "We want to break the idea that autism should definitely be suppressed," he says.
Michelle Dawson, right, is autistic. She's also a researcher in the lab of Laurent Mottron (left), a psychiatrist who specializes in autism. Photo: Jessica Dimmock
Michelle Dawson doesn't drive or cook. Public transit overwhelms her, and face-to-face interaction is an ordeal. She was employed as a postal worker in 1998 when she "came out of the closet" with her diagnosis of autism, which she received in the early '90s. After that, she claims, Canada Post harassed her to such a degree that she was forced to take a permanent leave of absence, starting in 2002. (Canada Post says Dawson was treated fairly.) To fight back, she went on an information-devouring rampage. "There's such a variety of human behavior. Why is my kind wrong?" she asks. She eventually began scouring the libraries of McGill University in Montreal to delve into the autism literature. She searched out journal articles using the online catalog and sat on the floor reading studies among the stacks.
Dawson, like Baggs, has become a reluctant spokesperson for this new view of autism. Both are prolific bloggers and correspond constantly with scientists, parents' groups, medical institutions, the courts, journalists, and anyone else who'll listen to their stories of how autistics are mistreated. Baggs has been using YouTube to make her point; Dawson's weapon is science.
In 2001, Dawson contacted Mottron, figuring that his clinic might help improve the quality of her life. Mottron tried to give her some advice on navigating the neurotypical world, but his tips on how to handle banking, shopping, and buses didn't help. After meeting with her a few times, Mottron began to suspect that what Dawson really needed was a sense of purpose. In 2003, he handed her one of his in-progress journal articles and asked her to copy-edit the grammar. So Dawson started reading. "I criticized his science almost immediately," she says.
Encouraged by Dawson's interest, Mottron sent her other papers. She responded with written critiques of his work. Then one day in early 2003, she called with a question. "I asked: How did they control for attention in that fMRI face study?' That caught his attention." Dawson had flagged an error that Mottron says most postdocs would have missed. He was impressed, and over the next few months he sought Dawson's input on other technical questions. Eventually, he invited her to collaborate with his research group, despite the fact that her only academic credential was a high school diploma.
Dawson has an incredible memory, but she's not a savant. What makes her unique, Mottron says, is her gift for scientific analysis — the way she can sniff through methodologies and statistical manipulation, hunting down tiny errors and weak links in logic.
Last summer, the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science published a study titled "The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence." The lead author was Michelle Dawson. The paper argues that autistic smarts have been underestimated because the tools for assessing intelligence depend on techniques ill-suited to autistics. The researchers administered two different intelligence tests to 51 children and adults diagnosed with autism and to 43 non-autistic children and adults.
The first test, known as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, has helped solidify the notion of peaks of ability amid otherwise pervasive mental retardation among autistics. The other test is Raven's Progressive Matrices, which requires neither a race against the clock nor a proctor breathing down your neck. The Raven is considered as reliable as the Wechsler, but the Wechsler is far more commonly used. Perhaps that's because it requires less effort for the average test taker. Raven measures abstract reasoning — "effortful" operations like spotting patterns or solving geometric puzzles. In contrast, much of the Wechsler assesses crystallized skills like acquired vocabulary, making correct change, or knowing that milk goes in the fridge and cereal in the cupboard — learned information that most people intuit or recall almost automatically.
What the researchers found was that while non-autistic subjects scored just about the same — a little above average — on both tests, the autistic group scored much better on the Raven. Two individuals' scores swung from the mentally retarded range to the 94th percentile. More significantly, the subset of autistic children in the study scored roughly 30 percentile points higher on the Raven than they did on the more language-dependent Wechsler, pulling all but a couple of them out of the range for mental retardation.
A number of scientists shrugged off the results — of course autistics would do better on nonverbal tests. But Dawson and her coauthors saw something more. The "peaks of ability" on the Wechsler correlated strongly with the average scores on the Raven. The finding suggests the Wechsler scores give only a glimpse of the autistics' intelligence, whereas the Raven — the gold standard of fluid intelligence testing — reveals the true, or at least truer, level of general intelligence.
Yet to a remarkable degree, scientists conducting cognitive evaluations continue to use tests which presume that people who can't communicate the answer don't know the answer. The question is: Why? Greg Allen, an assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says that although most researchers know the Wechsler doesn't provide a good assessment of people with autism, there's pressure to use the test anyway. "Say you're submitting a grant to study autistic people by comparing them to a control group," he says. "The first question that comes up is: Did you control for IQ? Matching people on IQ is meant to clean up the methodology, but I think it can also end up damaging the study."
And that hurts autistic people, Dawson says. She makes a comparison with blindness. Of course blind people have a disability and need special accommodation. But you wouldn't give a blind person a test heavily dependent on vision and interpret their poor score as an accurate measure of intelligence. Mottron is unequivocal: Because of recent research, especially the Raven paper, it's clearer than ever that so-called low-functioning people like Amanda Baggs are more intelligent than once presumed.The Dawson paper was hardly conclusive, but it generated buzz among scientists and the media. Mottron's team is now collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital's Zeffiro, a neuroimaging expert, to dig deeper. Zeffiro and company are looking for variable types of mental processing without asking, what's wrong with this brain? Their first study compares fMRI results from autistic and control subjects whose brains were imaged while they performed the Raven test. The group is currently crunching numbers for publication, and the study looks both perplexing and promising.
Surprisingly, they didn't find any variability in which parts of the brain lit up when subjects performed the tasks. "We thought we'd see different patterns of activation," Zeffiro says, "but it looks like the similarities outweigh the dissimilarities." When they examined participants' Raven scores together with response times, however, they noticed something odd. The two groups had the same error rates, but as an aggregate, the autistics completed the tasks 40 percent faster than the non-autistics. "They spent less time coming up with the same number of right answers. The only explanation we can see right now," Zeffiro says, is that autistic brains working on this set of tasks "seem to be engaged at a higher level of efficiency." That may have to do with greater connectivity within an area or areas of the brain. He and other researchers are already exploring this hypothesis using diffusion tensor imaging, which measures the density of brain wiring.
But critics of the difference model reject the whole idea that autism is merely another example of neuro-diversity. After all, being able to plan your meals for the week or ask for directions bespeak important forms of intelligence. "If you pretend the areas that are troubled aren't there, you miss important aspects of the person," says Fred Volkmar, director of Yale's Child Study Center.
In the vast majority of journal articles, autism is referred to as a disorder, and the majority of neuro-psychiatric experts will tell you that the description fits — something is wrong with the autistic brain. UCSF's Merzenich, who agrees that conventional intelligence-testing tools are misleading, still doesn't think the difference model makes sense. Many autistics are probably smarter than we think, he says. But there's little question that more severe autism is characterized by what Merzenich terms "grossly abnormal" brain development that can lead to a "catastrophic end state." Denying this reality, he says, is misguided. Yale's Volkmar likens it to telling a physically disabled person: "You don't need a wheelchair. Walk!"
Meanwhile parents, educators, and autism advocates worry that focusing on the latent abilities and intelligence of autistic people may eventually lead to cuts in funding both for research into a cure and services provided by government. As one mother of an autistic boy told me, "There's no question that my son needs treatment and a cure."
Back in Burlington, Baggs is cueing up another YouTube clip. She angles her computer screen so I can see it. Set to the soundtrack of Queen's "Under Pressure," it's a montage of close-up videos showing behaviors like pen clicking, thumb twiddling, and finger tapping. The message: Why are some stress-related behaviors socially permissible, while others — like the rocking bodies and flapping arms commonly associated with autism — are not? Hit count for the video at last check: 80,000 and climbing.
Should autism be treated? Yes, says Baggs, it should be treated with respect. "People aren't interested in us functioning with the brains we have," she says, because autism is considered to be outside the range of normal variability. "I don't fit the stereotype of autism. But who does?" she asks, hammering especially hard on the keyboard. "The definition of autism is so fluid and changing every few years." What's exciting, she says, is that Mottron and other scientists have "found universal strengths where others usually look for universal deficits." Neuro-cognitive science, she says, is finally catching up to what she and many other adults with autism have been saying all along.
Baggs is working on some new videos. One project is tentatively titled "Am I a Person Yet?" She'll explore communication, empathy, self-reflection — core elements of the human experience that have at times been used to define personhood itself. And at various points during the clip, she'll ask: "Am I a person yet?" It's a provocative idea, and you might find yourself thinking: She has a point.
David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) wrote about a terrorist attack response drill in issue 16.02.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Committee backs autism bills
Monday, February 25, 2008
BY ELISE YOUNG
STAFF WRITER
A legislative committee Monday put its support behind six bills designed to help New Jersey children and adults with autism, despite objections from the health-insurance industry and some advocates for the developmentally disabled.The legislation – including a health-insurance mandate for the most promising therapies, help with housing and a school “buddies” program – next will move to the full Assembly for a vote. Concerns raised by lobbyists, advocates and a few Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee members suggest that some of the bills may be reworked.A representative of the New Jersey Association of Health Plans testified that coverage for people with autism could drive up costs for others. Christine Stearns, representing the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said the increased premiums unfairly would shift costs on small business owners.Three advocates for people with developmental disabilities objected to the creation of a public advocate for autism issues, saying it could drain resources for people with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, mental retardation and other disorders. As a result, some committee members said they would support the legislation in the Assembly, but only if it more clearly defines how the state would staff and maintain such a position.Another bill would create identification cards for people with autism, who can have trouble communicating in emergency situations. The last would establish an official state Web site to help people with autism and their families learn about services.E-mail: younge@northjersey.com
A legislative committee Monday put its support behind six bills designed to help New Jersey children and adults with autism, despite objections from the health-insurance industry and some advocates for the developmentally disabled.
The legislation – including a health-insurance mandate for the most promising therapies, help with housing and a school “buddies” program – next will move to the full Assembly for a vote. Concerns raised by lobbyists, advocates and a few Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee members suggest that some of the bills may be reworked.
A representative of the New Jersey Association of Health Plans testified that coverage for people with autism could drive up costs for others. Christine Stearns, representing the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said the increased premiums unfairly would shift costs on small business owners.
Three advocates for people with developmental disabilities objected to the creation of a public advocate for autism issues, saying it could drain resources for people with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, mental retardation and other disorders. As a result, some committee members said they would support the legislation in the Assembly, but only if it more clearly defines how the state would staff and maintain such a position.
Another bill would create identification cards for people with autism, who can have trouble communicating in emergency situations. The last would establish an official state Web site to help people with autism and their families learn about services.
E-mail: younge@northjersey.com
BY ELISE YOUNG
STAFF WRITER
A legislative committee Monday put its support behind six bills designed to help New Jersey children and adults with autism, despite objections from the health-insurance industry and some advocates for the developmentally disabled.The legislation – including a health-insurance mandate for the most promising therapies, help with housing and a school “buddies” program – next will move to the full Assembly for a vote. Concerns raised by lobbyists, advocates and a few Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee members suggest that some of the bills may be reworked.A representative of the New Jersey Association of Health Plans testified that coverage for people with autism could drive up costs for others. Christine Stearns, representing the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said the increased premiums unfairly would shift costs on small business owners.Three advocates for people with developmental disabilities objected to the creation of a public advocate for autism issues, saying it could drain resources for people with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, mental retardation and other disorders. As a result, some committee members said they would support the legislation in the Assembly, but only if it more clearly defines how the state would staff and maintain such a position.Another bill would create identification cards for people with autism, who can have trouble communicating in emergency situations. The last would establish an official state Web site to help people with autism and their families learn about services.E-mail: younge@northjersey.com
A legislative committee Monday put its support behind six bills designed to help New Jersey children and adults with autism, despite objections from the health-insurance industry and some advocates for the developmentally disabled.
The legislation – including a health-insurance mandate for the most promising therapies, help with housing and a school “buddies” program – next will move to the full Assembly for a vote. Concerns raised by lobbyists, advocates and a few Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee members suggest that some of the bills may be reworked.
A representative of the New Jersey Association of Health Plans testified that coverage for people with autism could drive up costs for others. Christine Stearns, representing the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said the increased premiums unfairly would shift costs on small business owners.
Three advocates for people with developmental disabilities objected to the creation of a public advocate for autism issues, saying it could drain resources for people with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, mental retardation and other disorders. As a result, some committee members said they would support the legislation in the Assembly, but only if it more clearly defines how the state would staff and maintain such a position.
Another bill would create identification cards for people with autism, who can have trouble communicating in emergency situations. The last would establish an official state Web site to help people with autism and their families learn about services.
E-mail: younge@northjersey.com
YAI/NIPD Network's 29th Annual International Conference
YAI/NIPD Network's 29th Annual International ConferenceVisions of Hope and Opportunity in Developmental and Learning Disabilities
2008 Conference Highlights
2 Full-day Post-Conference Presentations Featuring:
Richard Lavoie"The Social Side of Learning Disorders: Motivating and Managing the Child who Struggles in School"
Dr. Jed Baker"Social Skills Training and Positive Behavioral Supports for Students with Autism, Aspergers and other Social-Communication Problems"
Exciting Keynote Presentations Including:
Dr. Temple Grandin on Autism Spectrum Disorders
2008 Conference Highlights
2 Full-day Post-Conference Presentations Featuring:
Richard Lavoie"The Social Side of Learning Disorders: Motivating and Managing the Child who Struggles in School"
Dr. Jed Baker"Social Skills Training and Positive Behavioral Supports for Students with Autism, Aspergers and other Social-Communication Problems"
Exciting Keynote Presentations Including:
Dr. Temple Grandin on Autism Spectrum Disorders
ADHD & ASPERGER SYNDROME: MAKING A DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS Presented by LYNDA GELLER, Ph.D.
CHADD OF SUFFOLK COUNTYPRESENTSWednesday, March 5, 2008 8 PM ADHD & ASPERGER SYNDROME:MAKING A DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSISPresented by LYNDA GELLER, Ph.D.CLINICAL DIRECTOR, THE ASPERGER INSTITUTENYU CHILD STUDY CENTERLocation: The Courtyard by Marriott, 5000 Express Dr. South,Ronkonkoma, NY, L.I.E. Exit 60 Service RdMeetings are free to members with a $5 donation for non-members.CERTIFICATES OF ATTENDANCE ARE AVAILABLE FOR TEACHERSSUPPORT GROUPS BEGIN AT 7:00 PM EST ALL ARE WELCOME!Patricia R. SchisselPresident, AHAAsperger Syndrome and High Functioning Autism Assoc.PO Box 916Bethpage, NY 11714516.470.0360 p
GIVING SIBLINGS THEIR DUE
By Dan Coulter
Who do you love more, your child who has a condition such as Asperger Syndrome or autism -- or your child who doesn't? Dumb question? It may not seem so dumb to a child who sees his or her parents devoting large amounts of time to a brother or sister with special needs.
If you sometimes find that you're so focused on helping one child that your
other children feel neglected or resentful, you're not alone. Let me share
some suggestions I've gathered from families in this situation about improving understanding and cooperation.
1. Talk with siblings early and often about a special needs child's
condition. Share appropriate information and explain what you're doing to
help that child and why it's important. It's easy to assume that typically
developing kids know more than they do about a sibling's special needs.
2. Listen to your children. If they have complaints or concerns, hear
them out and show that you're seriously considering what they say
before you reply. If they have reasonable concerns, act on them. If their
concerns aren't reasonable, be patient and reassuring when you offer
explanations. Consider holding both regular family meetings and
individual conversations with each child.
3. Think of your child with special needs as a child first and a
patient second. This helps him put his challenges in perspective, and
helps you realistically balance his requirements with the needs of your other children.
4. Spend some regular one-on-one time with each child in your family
doing something enjoy he or she enjoys. Even if one child's
condition requires more of your time than another's, showing each child that
he's special to you can go a long way toward gaining his understanding.
5. Pour on the praise when one child helps another. Making a child
feel good about helping can encourage a behavior to become a habit.
6. Give each of your children the freedom to develop their individual
identities and pursue their own interests. It's counterproductive to
make siblings feel guilty when they want to do something by themselves at
home or to spend some time alone with friends.
7. Find ways to give all your children roles in any therapies you do at
home. If you can make therapy time fun, even better.
8. Seek out practical ways to include your special needs child in
family activities, but don't get trapped into believing you have to
include every child in every activity. If a special needs child can't sit
quietly through a sibling's piano recital, find a trusted sitter so
the rest of the family can attend. A mother I spoke with recently talked about getting a sitter for her autistic son so that she, her husband
and two neurotypical sons could occasionally eat out in a
restaurant. This is a very caring family whose two older sons actively find
things to do with their autistic younger brother. They've found a
balance that's healthy for everyone.
9. Seek out appropriate support groups. A support group focused on
your child's condition can offer information and camaraderie. A
sibling support group can offer your neurotypical children the chance to
interact with kids who understand their situation in ways other peers
can't.
10. If you've got serious sibling issues, individual or family
counseling may offer solutions you might not think of on your own.
Making sure all your children feel loved and appreciated encourages your family to work as a team to support each other. And a team can accomplish more than one person. So, if caring for your special needs child seems to monopolize your time, consider that finding more ways to show your other children that they're important could help ease the demands on you and improve the quality of life for every member of your family.
That's the kind of win-win scenario we're all looking for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR - Dan Coulter is the producer of the DVDs, "Understanding Brothers and Sisters with Asperger Syndrome" and "Understanding Brothers and Sisters on the Autism Spectrum." You can find more articles on his website:
www.coultervideo.com.
Copyright 2008 Dan Coulter Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.
Who do you love more, your child who has a condition such as Asperger Syndrome or autism -- or your child who doesn't? Dumb question? It may not seem so dumb to a child who sees his or her parents devoting large amounts of time to a brother or sister with special needs.
If you sometimes find that you're so focused on helping one child that your
other children feel neglected or resentful, you're not alone. Let me share
some suggestions I've gathered from families in this situation about improving understanding and cooperation.
1. Talk with siblings early and often about a special needs child's
condition. Share appropriate information and explain what you're doing to
help that child and why it's important. It's easy to assume that typically
developing kids know more than they do about a sibling's special needs.
2. Listen to your children. If they have complaints or concerns, hear
them out and show that you're seriously considering what they say
before you reply. If they have reasonable concerns, act on them. If their
concerns aren't reasonable, be patient and reassuring when you offer
explanations. Consider holding both regular family meetings and
individual conversations with each child.
3. Think of your child with special needs as a child first and a
patient second. This helps him put his challenges in perspective, and
helps you realistically balance his requirements with the needs of your other children.
4. Spend some regular one-on-one time with each child in your family
doing something enjoy he or she enjoys. Even if one child's
condition requires more of your time than another's, showing each child that
he's special to you can go a long way toward gaining his understanding.
5. Pour on the praise when one child helps another. Making a child
feel good about helping can encourage a behavior to become a habit.
6. Give each of your children the freedom to develop their individual
identities and pursue their own interests. It's counterproductive to
make siblings feel guilty when they want to do something by themselves at
home or to spend some time alone with friends.
7. Find ways to give all your children roles in any therapies you do at
home. If you can make therapy time fun, even better.
8. Seek out practical ways to include your special needs child in
family activities, but don't get trapped into believing you have to
include every child in every activity. If a special needs child can't sit
quietly through a sibling's piano recital, find a trusted sitter so
the rest of the family can attend. A mother I spoke with recently talked about getting a sitter for her autistic son so that she, her husband
and two neurotypical sons could occasionally eat out in a
restaurant. This is a very caring family whose two older sons actively find
things to do with their autistic younger brother. They've found a
balance that's healthy for everyone.
9. Seek out appropriate support groups. A support group focused on
your child's condition can offer information and camaraderie. A
sibling support group can offer your neurotypical children the chance to
interact with kids who understand their situation in ways other peers
can't.
10. If you've got serious sibling issues, individual or family
counseling may offer solutions you might not think of on your own.
Making sure all your children feel loved and appreciated encourages your family to work as a team to support each other. And a team can accomplish more than one person. So, if caring for your special needs child seems to monopolize your time, consider that finding more ways to show your other children that they're important could help ease the demands on you and improve the quality of life for every member of your family.
That's the kind of win-win scenario we're all looking for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR - Dan Coulter is the producer of the DVDs, "Understanding Brothers and Sisters with Asperger Syndrome" and "Understanding Brothers and Sisters on the Autism Spectrum." You can find more articles on his website:
www.coultervideo.com.
Copyright 2008 Dan Coulter Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.
Webinar: Virginia's Next Steps Transition Program for Families, Youths and Professionals Workshop
Mar 03, 2008
Building Effective Partnerships and Accessing Resources
Virginia’s Next Steps Transition Program for Families, Youths and Professionals: “Building Effective Partnerships and Accessing Resources” SAVE THE DATES! Bringing together all the elements needed for a successful transition for youth with disabilities can be a monumental effort. The Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center (PEATC) in collaboration with Virginia Commonwealth University- Rehabilitative Research Training Center is offering a webinar training series for parents, self-advocates, and transition professionals. Using case studies, expert material and voluntary fieldwork, participants will learn the varying ways families, self-advocates, educators and adult service providers can tackle the challenge of creating a workable plan to support measurable post secondary goals. Monday, March 3, 2008 2pm-2:45pm—Webinar One: Laying the Groundwork for Transition Monday, March 10, 2008 2pm-2:45pm—Webinar Two: Exploring the Future and Creating a Timeline Monday, March 17, 2008 2pm-2:45pm—Webinar Three: Supporting Life Long Learning to register visit http://www.worksupport.com/training/webcastSeries.cfm/8
Building Effective Partnerships and Accessing Resources
Virginia’s Next Steps Transition Program for Families, Youths and Professionals: “Building Effective Partnerships and Accessing Resources” SAVE THE DATES! Bringing together all the elements needed for a successful transition for youth with disabilities can be a monumental effort. The Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center (PEATC) in collaboration with Virginia Commonwealth University- Rehabilitative Research Training Center is offering a webinar training series for parents, self-advocates, and transition professionals. Using case studies, expert material and voluntary fieldwork, participants will learn the varying ways families, self-advocates, educators and adult service providers can tackle the challenge of creating a workable plan to support measurable post secondary goals. Monday, March 3, 2008 2pm-2:45pm—Webinar One: Laying the Groundwork for Transition Monday, March 10, 2008 2pm-2:45pm—Webinar Two: Exploring the Future and Creating a Timeline Monday, March 17, 2008 2pm-2:45pm—Webinar Three: Supporting Life Long Learning to register visit http://www.worksupport.com/training/webcastSeries.cfm/8
F.D.A. Seeks to Broaden Range of Use for Drugs
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: February 16, 2008
WASHINGTON — When federal drug regulators approve a medicine for sale, they limit how drug makers sell it. A drug approved to treat only breast cancer cannot be marketed for lung cancer even if some studies suggest that the medicine may save lung patients.
Skip to next paragraph
But the Food and Drug Administration proposed guidelines Friday that would change this, and advocates on both sides of the issue say that lives are at stake.
The rules would allow drug and device makers to provide doctors with copies of medical journal articles that discuss product uses that have not been vetted or approved by the F.D.A. The rules also say that drug companies do not have to promise to adequately test the unapproved use discussed in the article.
Advocates of the rule say the F.D.A. is so slow in assessing drug and device benefits that companies need to be able to hand out medical journal articles so that doctors can learn immediately about life-saving uses.
“The consequence of rapid disclosure of these benefits could be measured in lives,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former F.D.A. deputy commissioner.
Ken Johnson, senior vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said that “journal articles can offer physicians valuable insight that helps them make informed decisions regarding appropriate medical treatments for their patients.”
But critics of the proposal say that drug and device companies have a long history of promoting unapproved drug and device uses that later proved dangerous and that allowing companies to talk about such unapproved uses removes incentives for companies to research adequately whether the new use is actually beneficial.
“People will die if they are getting drugs that don’t have clear evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s health research group.
Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, said the proposed rule “caters to the industry’s desire to market their products without adequate testing or review.”
The F.D.A. will accept comments from the public on the proposal and take it up for final consideration in 60 days.
The reason for this debate is that doctors are not overseen by the F.D.A. Medicine is regulated by state medical boards, which generally let doctors prescribe drugs and devices as they see fit regardless of F.D.A. judgments.
In some cases, this is beneficial. Pediatricians for years had very few drugs approved for their use because drug makers often failed to test new medicines in children. So they prescribed drugs for children anyway, and, sometimes, saved lives.
A 2006 study estimated that more than 20 percent of all prescriptions written by doctors were for unapproved uses.
But drug makers have in the past abused doctors’ discretion by telling them that some medicines were appropriate for patients in whom the drugs may have caused more harm than good. In 2004, Pfizer paid a $430 million fine to resolve criminal and civil charges that it marketed its epilepsy drug Neurontin for conditions in which the company’s own studies suggested that the drug was ineffective.
The F.D.A. has for years struggled to find the appropriate balance between the need to inform doctors of experimental but hopeful drug and device uses and the need to guard against hucksters promoting dangerous products as cure-alls.
To complicate the issue, the drug agency’s power to prevent companies from providing truthful, albeit uncertain, information to doctors has been questioned by federal courts as a possible infringement of commercial free-speech rights.
Congress stepped in to resolve the issue in 1997, passing a law that let drug makers hand out studies from medical journals as long as reprints were given to the F.D.A. beforehand and they promised to seek approval from the agency of the use discussed.
That law lapsed in 2006 and “questions have been raised since then about what our policy is,” said Rita Chappelle, an F.D.A. spokeswoman.
Under the proposed rule, the agency would let drug and device companies pass out articles to doctors if the articles were peer-reviewed and came from a journal with an expert editorial board. The article must be accompanied by a prominent warning that the use described is not approved or cleared by the F.D.A.
The agency abandoned the requirement that drug and device makers must provide the studies to the F.D.A. beforehand or promise to seek approval of the discussed use. An F.D.A. official said the agency did not really enforce those requirements anyway.
Diane Edquist Dorman, vice president of the National Organization for Rare Disorders, said she supported the F.D.A. position because patients with rare diseases are generally treated with unapproved drug uses about which doctors must be informed.
“And these companies are just never going to do the confirmatory trials when only a couple of hundred people have the disease,” she said.
But Dr. Steven Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said the rule would stop companies from underwriting expensive trials to confirm new drug uses. “Companies could openly promote products for unapproved indications without testing these drugs,” he said. “I’m astonished that this rule would even be considered.”
Published: February 16, 2008
WASHINGTON — When federal drug regulators approve a medicine for sale, they limit how drug makers sell it. A drug approved to treat only breast cancer cannot be marketed for lung cancer even if some studies suggest that the medicine may save lung patients.
Skip to next paragraph
But the Food and Drug Administration proposed guidelines Friday that would change this, and advocates on both sides of the issue say that lives are at stake.
The rules would allow drug and device makers to provide doctors with copies of medical journal articles that discuss product uses that have not been vetted or approved by the F.D.A. The rules also say that drug companies do not have to promise to adequately test the unapproved use discussed in the article.
Advocates of the rule say the F.D.A. is so slow in assessing drug and device benefits that companies need to be able to hand out medical journal articles so that doctors can learn immediately about life-saving uses.
“The consequence of rapid disclosure of these benefits could be measured in lives,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former F.D.A. deputy commissioner.
Ken Johnson, senior vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said that “journal articles can offer physicians valuable insight that helps them make informed decisions regarding appropriate medical treatments for their patients.”
But critics of the proposal say that drug and device companies have a long history of promoting unapproved drug and device uses that later proved dangerous and that allowing companies to talk about such unapproved uses removes incentives for companies to research adequately whether the new use is actually beneficial.
“People will die if they are getting drugs that don’t have clear evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s health research group.
Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, said the proposed rule “caters to the industry’s desire to market their products without adequate testing or review.”
The F.D.A. will accept comments from the public on the proposal and take it up for final consideration in 60 days.
The reason for this debate is that doctors are not overseen by the F.D.A. Medicine is regulated by state medical boards, which generally let doctors prescribe drugs and devices as they see fit regardless of F.D.A. judgments.
In some cases, this is beneficial. Pediatricians for years had very few drugs approved for their use because drug makers often failed to test new medicines in children. So they prescribed drugs for children anyway, and, sometimes, saved lives.
A 2006 study estimated that more than 20 percent of all prescriptions written by doctors were for unapproved uses.
But drug makers have in the past abused doctors’ discretion by telling them that some medicines were appropriate for patients in whom the drugs may have caused more harm than good. In 2004, Pfizer paid a $430 million fine to resolve criminal and civil charges that it marketed its epilepsy drug Neurontin for conditions in which the company’s own studies suggested that the drug was ineffective.
The F.D.A. has for years struggled to find the appropriate balance between the need to inform doctors of experimental but hopeful drug and device uses and the need to guard against hucksters promoting dangerous products as cure-alls.
To complicate the issue, the drug agency’s power to prevent companies from providing truthful, albeit uncertain, information to doctors has been questioned by federal courts as a possible infringement of commercial free-speech rights.
Congress stepped in to resolve the issue in 1997, passing a law that let drug makers hand out studies from medical journals as long as reprints were given to the F.D.A. beforehand and they promised to seek approval from the agency of the use discussed.
That law lapsed in 2006 and “questions have been raised since then about what our policy is,” said Rita Chappelle, an F.D.A. spokeswoman.
Under the proposed rule, the agency would let drug and device companies pass out articles to doctors if the articles were peer-reviewed and came from a journal with an expert editorial board. The article must be accompanied by a prominent warning that the use described is not approved or cleared by the F.D.A.
The agency abandoned the requirement that drug and device makers must provide the studies to the F.D.A. beforehand or promise to seek approval of the discussed use. An F.D.A. official said the agency did not really enforce those requirements anyway.
Diane Edquist Dorman, vice president of the National Organization for Rare Disorders, said she supported the F.D.A. position because patients with rare diseases are generally treated with unapproved drug uses about which doctors must be informed.
“And these companies are just never going to do the confirmatory trials when only a couple of hundred people have the disease,” she said.
But Dr. Steven Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said the rule would stop companies from underwriting expensive trials to confirm new drug uses. “Companies could openly promote products for unapproved indications without testing these drugs,” he said. “I’m astonished that this rule would even be considered.”
WINTER AUTISM WORKSHOPS
WINTER AUTISM WORKSHOPS
These workshops are designed to offer training in the understanding and implementation of applied behavior analysis (ABA) procedures for individuals across the autism spectrum. These workshops are open to professionals and parents and workshop content is suitable for intervention with individuals of all ages and functioning levels across the autism spectrum.
A certificate of attendance will be given to all registrants. ASHA CEUs will be offerend for worskhops 2, 4, & 5. Lunch will be on your own.
For more information, please contact Marissa Bennett 516.937.1397 X217 or mbennett@eden2.org. Brochures can be viewed/downloaded at http://www.eden2.org/.
2. IS MY STUDENT REALLY LEARNING? A HANDS-ON WORKSHOP TO PROMOTE STUDENT SUCCESS
Dana Battaglia, M. Phil. CCC-SLP
Often individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are placed in inclusion settings, with the hope of successfully achieving academically and socially driven objectives. These objectives are created by multidisciplinary teams, and placed on a child’s Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). In this age of documentation, educators may become overwhelmed by the notion of data collection. This hands-on workshop will demonstrate different methods to monitor progress for individuals with ASD in inclusion settings. In addition, looking at student performance, and making adaptations to teaching methods accordingly, will be discussed.
Monday, February 25, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
3. UNDERSTANDING, ADDRESSING, AND MANAGING CHALLENGING BEHAVIOR IN THE SCHOOL – AGED INDIVIDUAL WITH AUTISM
Joanne Sgambati, PhD
The focus of this workshop is on the effective implementation of techniques chosen based on the functional assessment to address challenging behaviors in individuals with ASD. Preventative strategies include curricular, environmental, and instruction modifications, as well as the more strategic use of motivation systems. Reactive strategies to be discussed include time out, extinction, and overcorrection. Data collection procedures to help determine the efficacy of intervention will be highlighted along with guidelines for subsequent troubleshooting and intervention fading.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
4. Integrating Speech-Language and Communication Programming Across the Entire School Day: A Collaborative Team Approach
Jan Downey, MA, CCC-SLP
Autism is a disorder of communication and socialization. The acquisition of speech, language, and communication skills for individuals with severe communication disorders (such as autism) can be limited by poor generalization of acquired skills across environments. The success of the student’s ability to increase language acquisition, and functional communication skills require regular collaboration by all members of the educational team. A more consultative and collaborative approach increases the range of programming activities and environments for individuals who have communication impairments. Programming should be provided across all settings as opposed to the non-contextual environment of the speech-therapy room. Treatment goals relate to all aspects of the school, including curricular, classroom behavior and social interactions. This presentation will discuss the advantages of a “work load model” versus a “case load model,” and how the former can be more advantageous to students with severe language and communication deficits. Suggestions for practical applications will be discussed.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
5. PROMOTING SOCIAL SKILLS IN INDIVIDUALS WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS
Mary McDonald, PhD, BCBA
This workshop will discuss a variety of strategies that have been successful for improving social skills in individuals with ASD. Specific strategies to be discussed will include topics such as: the use of behavioral rehearsal, social stories, cognitive picture rehearsal, role playing, using video modeling and video self-modeling.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Fees are nonrefundable, unless cancellation notification is provided at least 48 hours prior to workshop.
Make checks payable to Eden II Programs, and mail registration form and fee to:
Eden II Programs/The Genesis School
270 Washington Avenue, Plainview, NY 11803
Attention: Marissa Bennett
For More Information: Phone: 516-937-1397 X217 ● mbennett@eden2.org
Registration Form:
Name:
Title:
Affiliation:
Address:
City: State: Zip:
Phone: Email:
Please check workshops attending:
___ 2. Is My Student Really Learning? A Hands-On Workshop To Promote Student Success- $100
___ 3. Understanding, Addressing, And Managing Challenging Behavior In The School – Aged Individual With Autism - $100
___ 4. Integrating Speech-Language And Communication Programming Across The Entire School Day: A Collaborative Team Approach - $100
___ 5. Promoting Social Skills In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders- $100
Directions to Four Points by Sheraton Plainview, 333 South Service Road,
Plainview, NY 11803
Traveling from the East:
Take the Long Island Expressway (I-495) to Round Swamp Road (Exit 48). Proceed down the exit ramp to traffic light. Turn left onto Round Swamp Road and proceed through traffic light. Once you pass the Mobil Gas Station, make a right into the Race Palace parking lot. Proceed 50 yards to the Hotel Entrance.
Traveling from the West:
Take the Long Island Expressway (I-495) to Round Swamp Road (Exit 48). Proceed down the exit ramp (merge into the right lane). The hotel entrance will be on the right.
These workshops are designed to offer training in the understanding and implementation of applied behavior analysis (ABA) procedures for individuals across the autism spectrum. These workshops are open to professionals and parents and workshop content is suitable for intervention with individuals of all ages and functioning levels across the autism spectrum.
A certificate of attendance will be given to all registrants. ASHA CEUs will be offerend for worskhops 2, 4, & 5. Lunch will be on your own.
For more information, please contact Marissa Bennett 516.937.1397 X217 or mbennett@eden2.org. Brochures can be viewed/downloaded at http://www.eden2.org/.
2. IS MY STUDENT REALLY LEARNING? A HANDS-ON WORKSHOP TO PROMOTE STUDENT SUCCESS
Dana Battaglia, M. Phil. CCC-SLP
Often individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are placed in inclusion settings, with the hope of successfully achieving academically and socially driven objectives. These objectives are created by multidisciplinary teams, and placed on a child’s Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). In this age of documentation, educators may become overwhelmed by the notion of data collection. This hands-on workshop will demonstrate different methods to monitor progress for individuals with ASD in inclusion settings. In addition, looking at student performance, and making adaptations to teaching methods accordingly, will be discussed.
Monday, February 25, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
3. UNDERSTANDING, ADDRESSING, AND MANAGING CHALLENGING BEHAVIOR IN THE SCHOOL – AGED INDIVIDUAL WITH AUTISM
Joanne Sgambati, PhD
The focus of this workshop is on the effective implementation of techniques chosen based on the functional assessment to address challenging behaviors in individuals with ASD. Preventative strategies include curricular, environmental, and instruction modifications, as well as the more strategic use of motivation systems. Reactive strategies to be discussed include time out, extinction, and overcorrection. Data collection procedures to help determine the efficacy of intervention will be highlighted along with guidelines for subsequent troubleshooting and intervention fading.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
4. Integrating Speech-Language and Communication Programming Across the Entire School Day: A Collaborative Team Approach
Jan Downey, MA, CCC-SLP
Autism is a disorder of communication and socialization. The acquisition of speech, language, and communication skills for individuals with severe communication disorders (such as autism) can be limited by poor generalization of acquired skills across environments. The success of the student’s ability to increase language acquisition, and functional communication skills require regular collaboration by all members of the educational team. A more consultative and collaborative approach increases the range of programming activities and environments for individuals who have communication impairments. Programming should be provided across all settings as opposed to the non-contextual environment of the speech-therapy room. Treatment goals relate to all aspects of the school, including curricular, classroom behavior and social interactions. This presentation will discuss the advantages of a “work load model” versus a “case load model,” and how the former can be more advantageous to students with severe language and communication deficits. Suggestions for practical applications will be discussed.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
5. PROMOTING SOCIAL SKILLS IN INDIVIDUALS WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS
Mary McDonald, PhD, BCBA
This workshop will discuss a variety of strategies that have been successful for improving social skills in individuals with ASD. Specific strategies to be discussed will include topics such as: the use of behavioral rehearsal, social stories, cognitive picture rehearsal, role playing, using video modeling and video self-modeling.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Four Points by Sheraton, Plainview
Fee: $100
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Fees are nonrefundable, unless cancellation notification is provided at least 48 hours prior to workshop.
Make checks payable to Eden II Programs, and mail registration form and fee to:
Eden II Programs/The Genesis School
270 Washington Avenue, Plainview, NY 11803
Attention: Marissa Bennett
For More Information: Phone: 516-937-1397 X217 ● mbennett@eden2.org
Registration Form:
Name:
Title:
Affiliation:
Address:
City: State: Zip:
Phone: Email:
Please check workshops attending:
___ 2. Is My Student Really Learning? A Hands-On Workshop To Promote Student Success- $100
___ 3. Understanding, Addressing, And Managing Challenging Behavior In The School – Aged Individual With Autism - $100
___ 4. Integrating Speech-Language And Communication Programming Across The Entire School Day: A Collaborative Team Approach - $100
___ 5. Promoting Social Skills In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders- $100
Directions to Four Points by Sheraton Plainview, 333 South Service Road,
Plainview, NY 11803
Traveling from the East:
Take the Long Island Expressway (I-495) to Round Swamp Road (Exit 48). Proceed down the exit ramp to traffic light. Turn left onto Round Swamp Road and proceed through traffic light. Once you pass the Mobil Gas Station, make a right into the Race Palace parking lot. Proceed 50 yards to the Hotel Entrance.
Traveling from the West:
Take the Long Island Expressway (I-495) to Round Swamp Road (Exit 48). Proceed down the exit ramp (merge into the right lane). The hotel entrance will be on the right.
THE INFANCY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD TRAINING COURSE COMES TO YOU – ONLINE!
THE INFANCY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD TRAINING COURSE
COMES TO YOU – ONLINE!
The Basic Course on the DIR®/Floortime™ Model
Taught by Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, The George Washington University Medical School, Supervising Child Psychoanalyst, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and Chair, Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders
For the FIRST TIME, the Infancy and Early Childhood Training Course will be presented ONLINE!
The course will be available to registered participants for a two-week period from April 25 through May 9, 2008
Take the course in the comfort of your own home or office, at your own pace and without the added expenses of travel and lodging!
The Basic Course Topics Include:
Assessment, Diagnosis and Intervention for Developmental and Emotional Disorders
Including: Autistic Spectrum Disorders; Multisystem Developmental Disorders; Regulatory Disorders involving Attention, Learning and Behavior Problems; Cognitive, Language, Motor and Sensory Disturbances; and a range of Infant and Early Childhood Developmental and Mental Health Problems such as Trauma, Abuse and Neglect
Post-Conference Workshop
Regulatory Sensory Processing Disorders
Sensory, motor, and emotional patterns underlying challenges in relating and communicating including Autism Spectrum Disorder, Regulatory Disorder, ADHD, behavior problems and learning challenges.
Taught by
Rosemary White, OTR/L and Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.
To download a brochure with complete details and registration materials, click here http://www.stanleygreenspan.com/PDF/Brochure%20final%20IEC6035%20Program_v4.pdf (if the link does not work, cut and paste the link into your browser)
For more information, visit www.stanleygreenspan.com
Questions: info@stanleygreenspan.com
COMES TO YOU – ONLINE!
The Basic Course on the DIR®/Floortime™ Model
Taught by Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, The George Washington University Medical School, Supervising Child Psychoanalyst, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and Chair, Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders
For the FIRST TIME, the Infancy and Early Childhood Training Course will be presented ONLINE!
The course will be available to registered participants for a two-week period from April 25 through May 9, 2008
Take the course in the comfort of your own home or office, at your own pace and without the added expenses of travel and lodging!
The Basic Course Topics Include:
Assessment, Diagnosis and Intervention for Developmental and Emotional Disorders
Including: Autistic Spectrum Disorders; Multisystem Developmental Disorders; Regulatory Disorders involving Attention, Learning and Behavior Problems; Cognitive, Language, Motor and Sensory Disturbances; and a range of Infant and Early Childhood Developmental and Mental Health Problems such as Trauma, Abuse and Neglect
Post-Conference Workshop
Regulatory Sensory Processing Disorders
Sensory, motor, and emotional patterns underlying challenges in relating and communicating including Autism Spectrum Disorder, Regulatory Disorder, ADHD, behavior problems and learning challenges.
Taught by
Rosemary White, OTR/L and Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.
To download a brochure with complete details and registration materials, click here http://www.stanleygreenspan.com/PDF/Brochure%20final%20IEC6035%20Program_v4.pdf (if the link does not work, cut and paste the link into your browser)
For more information, visit www.stanleygreenspan.com
Questions: info@stanleygreenspan.com
JCCA’s third annual Compass Project* workshop
Get Ready, Get Set, Go!JCCA’s third annual Compass Project* workshop,an exploration of opportunities to increase academic success and the transition to adulthood.Sunday, March 16, 20089:00 AM — 1:00 PMC.W. Post Campus, 720 Northern Blvd, Brookville, L.I.Reserve your place now by registering online!If you would prefer to send your registration by mail, download the brochure and registration form. Registration is $25 per person or $40 per parent and student (includes kosher breakfast).*The Compass Project is a Queens/Long Island program that serves the special needs of Jewish high school and college-aged teens, ranging from youth with learning disabilities to youth on the autism spectrum. Compass provides counseling, education direction, and social support to young people making the transition to an independent future. For more, visit www.jccany.org/compass.
Schedule9:00 AMRegistration and Breakfast9:30-10:30 AMKEYNOTE: Social and academic development and strategies to increase success. Matthew Cruger, Ph.D., pediatric neuropsychologist at the Learning and Achievement Institute, NYC Child Study Center.10:45-11 45 AM Presentations from School Representatives11:45 AM-12:45 PMBreakout Sessions:For Parents: What You Need to Know: VESID and Helpful Info from our Legal ExpertFor Students: What to Expect—A Presentation from our College Student Panel12:45-1:00 PMQuestions and Answers, Feedback
Schedule9:00 AMRegistration and Breakfast9:30-10:30 AMKEYNOTE: Social and academic development and strategies to increase success. Matthew Cruger, Ph.D., pediatric neuropsychologist at the Learning and Achievement Institute, NYC Child Study Center.10:45-11 45 AM Presentations from School Representatives11:45 AM-12:45 PMBreakout Sessions:For Parents: What You Need to Know: VESID and Helpful Info from our Legal ExpertFor Students: What to Expect—A Presentation from our College Student Panel12:45-1:00 PMQuestions and Answers, Feedback
New Timeline Chronicles Pivotal Events That Shaped the Modern View of Autism
This historic timeline on autism covers more than a half century of key events that helped shaped the modern view of autism -- just in time for national Autism Awareness month this April. Jayne Lytel, author of Act Early Against Autism, which debuts March 4, 2008 (A Perigee Trade Paperback Original), developed the timeline.
Washington, DC (PRWEB) February 7, 2008 -- This historic timeline on autism covers more than a half century of key events that helped shaped the modern view of autism -- just in time for national Autism Awareness month this April.
More than a half century has passed since autism first got its name, yet controversies over its cause and treatment remain a mystery.
Since 1943, when Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins wrote his pivotal paper that established autism as a childhood psychiatric disorder, four autism legends have died, and autism has stepped out of the shadows and into the public eye as its prevalence now strikes one child out of every 150 in the United States and is the fastest growing serious developmental disability in the United States.
The interactive timeline, replete with pictures of autism legends, covers the progression of treatments, from the rise of applied behavior analysis in the mid-1960s to the emergence of Floortime in the early 1990s. It also features landmark studies and important books, including The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of Self by world-famous Chicago psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and The Me Book by Dr. O. Ivar Lovaas of the University of California in Los Angeles.
Other crucial facts covered in the timeline:
1977: Dr. Susan Folstein, professor of psychiatry at Tufts University, replaced the bad parenting theory with evidence that autism has complex genetic roots.
1980: Autism was officially recognized as a developmental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III after increasing data showed that autism has a neurological basis.
1998: Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a surgeon who became a gut expert, comes to public attention when Lacent medical journal publishes his study that suggested a possible link between rising rates of autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
Government statistics on the prevalence of autism also are highlighted.
Go back to 1911 to see who first introduced the term autism and how experts disproved theories over its cause in this interactive timeline on Autism's Origins at http://www.autismtimeline.com
Autism's Origins is the creation of Jayne Lytel, author of Act Early Against Autism: Give Your Child a Fighting Chance from the Start (A Perigee Trade Paperback Original). Her web site is http://www.jaynelytel.com.
Washington, DC (PRWEB) February 7, 2008 -- This historic timeline on autism covers more than a half century of key events that helped shaped the modern view of autism -- just in time for national Autism Awareness month this April.
More than a half century has passed since autism first got its name, yet controversies over its cause and treatment remain a mystery.
Since 1943, when Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins wrote his pivotal paper that established autism as a childhood psychiatric disorder, four autism legends have died, and autism has stepped out of the shadows and into the public eye as its prevalence now strikes one child out of every 150 in the United States and is the fastest growing serious developmental disability in the United States.
The interactive timeline, replete with pictures of autism legends, covers the progression of treatments, from the rise of applied behavior analysis in the mid-1960s to the emergence of Floortime in the early 1990s. It also features landmark studies and important books, including The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of Self by world-famous Chicago psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and The Me Book by Dr. O. Ivar Lovaas of the University of California in Los Angeles.
Other crucial facts covered in the timeline:
1977: Dr. Susan Folstein, professor of psychiatry at Tufts University, replaced the bad parenting theory with evidence that autism has complex genetic roots.
1980: Autism was officially recognized as a developmental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III after increasing data showed that autism has a neurological basis.
1998: Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a surgeon who became a gut expert, comes to public attention when Lacent medical journal publishes his study that suggested a possible link between rising rates of autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
Government statistics on the prevalence of autism also are highlighted.
Go back to 1911 to see who first introduced the term autism and how experts disproved theories over its cause in this interactive timeline on Autism's Origins at http://www.autismtimeline.com
Autism's Origins is the creation of Jayne Lytel, author of Act Early Against Autism: Give Your Child a Fighting Chance from the Start (A Perigee Trade Paperback Original). Her web site is http://www.jaynelytel.com.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
This is an index to the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Education of Students with Disabilities
This is an index to the Regulations. It may be a help when researchingcertain topics. It will also be available on the AHA yahoo website for reference.Regulations of the Commissioner of EducationParts 200 and 201Relating to the Education of Students with DisabilitiesOctober 2007INDEXPART 200 -
STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES
Section PageAbuse, prevention of, students in residential placement200.15 152Academic achievement, functional performance and learning characteristics200.1(ww)(3)(i)(a) 12Accounting requirements for approved programs200.9(d) 126Adaptive behavior200.1(a) 1Adapted physical education200.1(b) 1Admission to public schools of students residing in institutions200.11 146Aging out200.4(i) 60Alternative format materials200.2(b)(10), 200.2(i) 22, 31Amendments to the IEP200.4(g) 58Annual review200.1(c); 200.16(g) 1, 164200.4(f) 57Appeal to a State review officer200.5(k) 88Approval of services200.2(d) 26Approval of orders of the Family Court200.8(a) 121Approved private school200.1(d) 1Assistive technology device200.1(e) 1Assistive technology service200.1(f) 1Autism200.1(zz)(1) 13Autism, educational programs for students with200.13 149Aversive Intervention200.1(lll); 200.7(b)(8) 18, 112Aversive Intervention - child-specific exception to use200.22(e) 189Aversive Intervention - program standards200.22(f) 191Behavioral Intervention Plan200.1(mmm); 200.22(b) 18, 185Behavioral Interventions - program standards200.22 184Blind, deaf, & severely physically disturbed students - appointment to200.7(d) 114State-operated and State-supported schoolsBoard of education responsibilities200.2 18Board policy200.2(b) 20Business day200.1(n)(2) 3Census and register of students with disabilities200.2(a)(1) 18Change in program200.1(g) 2Change in placement200.1(h) 2Class size200.1(i) 2Close-down period procedures - private programs200.9(g) 143Committee on Preschool Special Education (CPSE)200.1(j), 200.3 2, 32Committee on Special Education (CSE)200.1(k), 200.3 2, 32Complaint procedures200.5(l) 88Confidentiality of personally identifiable data200.5(e) 73Consent200.1(l); 200.5(b) 2, 68Consultant teacher services200.1(m); 200.6(d) 3, 96Continuum of Services200.6; 200.16(i) 94, 167Continuum of Services - co-teaching200.6(g) 98Data Collection200.2(a)(3) 19Data Reporting200.2(a)(4) 19Data Requirements200.2(a)(2) 19Days200.1(n) 3Day treatment programs certified by office of Mental Health200.14 150Deafness200.1(zz)(2) 14Deaf-blindness200.1(zz)(3) 14Declassification200.4(d)(1)(iii) 46Direct consultant teacher services200.1(m)(1); 200.6(d)(2) 3, 96 District plans200.2 (c); 24Due process complaint notification requirements200.5(i) 78Due process procedures200.5 66Educational programs for preschool students w/disabilities200.16 158Educational programs for students with autism200.13 149Eligibility determinations200.4(c) 45 Eligibility of students w/disabilities - day treatment200.14(b) 150Eligibility - preschool200.16(a) 158Emergency Interventions200.22(d) 188Emotional disturbance200.1(zz)(4) 14Evaluation - preschool200.16(c) 159Extracurricular participation200.2(b)(1) 21Financial reporting requirements for approved programs200.9(e) 127Fiscal year200.1(o) 3Fiscal audits200.18 174Full-day preschool program200.1(p) 3Full-day session200.1(q) 4Functional behavioral assessment200.1(r) 4General curriculum200.1(t) 4Group instruction200.1(ww)(3)(ii) 13Grouping for instruction - day treatment200.14(f) 151Guardian ad litem200.1(s) 4Half-day preschool program200.1(u) 4Half-day session200.1(v) 4Hearing impairment200.1(zz)(5) 14Highly qualified personnel200.2(i)(2) 32Home and hospital instruction200.1(w); 200.6(i) 4, 101Homeless youth200.1(hhh) 17IEP components200.4(d)(2) 46IEP implementation200.4(e) 53Impartial due process hearings200.5(i) 80Impartial hearing officer200.1(x) 5Impartial hearing officer rates200.21(a) 183Impartial hearing officer - suspension/revocation of certification200.21(b) 183Independent evaluation200.1(z); 200.5(g) 6, 75Independent evaluation - preschool200.16(d)(3) 160Independent education evaluations200.5(g) 75Indirect consultant teacher services200.1(m)(2) 3Individual evaluation200.1(aa); 200.4(b); 6, 39 200.16(c) 159Individual evaluation - day treatment programs200.14(c) 151Individualized education program (IEP)200.1(y); 200.4(d)(2) 6, 46Individualized education program (IEP) - preschool200.16(e)(3) 161Individual psychological evaluation200.1(bb) 6Ineligible200.4(d)(1) 46Interim Alternative Education Setting (IAES)200.6(n) 108Interpreting services200.1(nnn) 18Justification for proposed expenditures for State aid200.10(a-n) 144Learning disability200.1(zz)(6) 15Learning disabilities - additional procedures for identifying200.4(j) 63Least restrictive environment (LRE)200.1(cc) 7Levels of service200.6 (l) 108Limited English proficient student200.1(iii) 17Maintenance of lists200.2(e) 26Management needs200.1(ww)(3)(i)(d) 13Mediation200.5(h) 76Mediator200.1(dd) 7Medical services200.1(ee) 7Meeting notice200.5(c) 71Mental retardation200.1(zz)(7) 15Multiple disabilities200.1(zz)(8) 15Native language200.1(ff) 7Notice of closing, transfer of ownership, voluntary termination - privateschools 200.7(e) 121Notice of meetings200.5(c) 71Occupational therapy200.1(gg) 8Operation & administration of private schools & State-operated200.7 (b) 111& State-supported schoolsOperational & administrative provisions-private schools200.7(c) 113Orthopedic impairment200.1(zz)(9) 15Other health impairment200.1(zz)(10) 15Parent200.1(ii) 8Parent counseling & training200.1(kk); 200.6(h)(8); 8, 101200.13(d); 150 Parent participation in CSE meetings200.5(d) 72Participating agency200.1(jj) 8Pendency (Pending placement)200.4(e)(4); 56200.16(h)(3)(i) 165 Prevention of abuse - residential placements200.15 152Physical development200.1(ww)(3)(i) (c) 13Physical therapy200.1(ll) 9Preschool program200.1(nn); 200.16 10, 158Preschool program-approval, operation, and administration of200.20 176Preschool - provision of service200.16(e) 163Preschool student with a disability200.1(mm) 9Prior notice200.1(oo); 200.5(a) 10, 66Private Schools - approval200.7(a) 109Private schools, in-state or out-of-state200.6(i) 102Private/state-operated or -supported schools - standards200.7 109Procedural due process - preschool200.16(h) 165Procedural safeguards notice200.5(f) 74Procedures for referral, evaluation, individualized education program (IEP)200.4 36development, placement, and reviewProfessional Development Plan200.2(h) 31Program Standards for education programs - private200.7 109schools and State-operated or -supported schoolsRange of achievement in special class200.6(h)(7) 101Recommendation (IEP)200.4(d) 46Recommendation (IEP) - day treatment200.14(d) 151Recommendation (IEP) - preschool200.16(e) 161Referral200.4(a) 36Referral - preschool students200.16(b) 158Regular education teacher200.1(pp) 10Reimbursement - public school district administrative costs & due200.17 171process costsReimbursement rates for approved programs200.9(f) 130Reimbursement to certain state-operated and state-supported200.10 144schools for blind, deaf and severely disabledReimbursement to preschool programs200.19 176Related services200.1(qq); 200.6(e) 11, 96Requests for information to the CSE from Family Court, probation, etc.200.4(h) 59Residential school200.4(d)(4)(b) 52Resource room programs200.1(rr); 200.6(f) 11, 97Responsibility of BOE contracting with another BOE200.2(f) 27Responsibility of boards of cooperative educational services (BOCES)200.2(i) 31Responsibility of BOCES for special education space requirement plans200.2(g) 27School day200.1(n)(1) 3School health services200.1(ss) 11Similarity of need200.6(a)(3) 94Social development200.1(ww)(i)(b) 12Social history200.1(tt) 13Special classes200.1(uu); 200.6(g) 12, 98Special education200.1(ww) 12Special education provider200.1(xx) 13Special education space requirement plans200.2(g) 27Special education teacher200.1(yy) 13Special factors (consideration of)200.4(d)(3) 51Specially-designed instruction200.1(vv) 12Speech-impairment200.1(zz)(11) 15Staffing requirements200.6(b) 95State assistance for instruction of students with disabilities200.8 121State assistance for transportation of students w/disabilities200.12 148State complaint procedures200.5(l) 88State-operated and supported schools - standards for educational programs200.7 109Student progress reports - day treatment200.14(e) 151Student's status during proceedings - see also pendency200.5(m) 91Student with a disability200.1(zz) 13Subcommittee200.3(c);200.4(e)(2)(ii) 34, 54Submission of claims200.8(c) 122Substantial regression200.1(aaa) 16Supplementary aids and services200.1(bbb) 16Supplementary School Personnel200.1(hh) 8 Surrogate parent200.1(ccc); 200.5(n) 16, 92Tests & assessment procedures200.4(b)(6)(i) 42Timeline - IEP implementation200.4(e) 53Transition services200.1(fff);200.4(d)(2)(ix) 17, 50Transitional support services200.1(ddd); 200.6(c) 16, 96Transportation, state assistance200.12 148Traumatic brain injury200.1(zz)(12) 15Travel training200.1(ggg) 17Tuition - definitions200.9(a) 124Tuition rates200.9 124Twelve-month special service and/or program200.1(eee); 200.6(k) 16, 106Universal design200.1(jjj) 17Use of time-out rooms200.22 (c) 186Visual impairment200.1(zz)(13) 16Waiver200.6(l) 107Ward of the State200.1(kkk) 18Withdrawing a referral200.4(a)(7) 38Written notice - upon graduation or aging out200.4(i) 60Written policy200.2(b) 20PART 201 PROCEDURAL SAFEGUARDS FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIESSUBJECT TO DISCIPLINESection PageBehavioral intervention plan201.2(a) 197Change in placement - IHO authority201.8 205Change in placement - involving weapons, Illegal drugs or controlledsubstances 201.7(e) 204Committee on Special Education or CSE201.2(b) 197Controlled substance201.2(c) 197Coordination w/superintendent's hearing and other due process201.9 206procedures applicable to all studentsCSE responsibilities for expedited evaluations201.6 203CSE responsibilities for functional behavioral assessments &201.3 200intervention plansDefinitions201.2 197 Day (Calendar)201.2(d) 197Determination (manifestation)201.4(d) 201Deficiencies in IEP or Placement (manifestation)201.4(e) 201Disciplinary change in placement201.2(e) 198Discipline for students presumed to have a disability201.5 201Exception for pattern of suspensions or removals201.7(d) 204Expedited due process hearing201.2(f); 201.11 198, 209Expedited evaluation201.2(g) 198Five school day suspension or removal201.7(b) 200Functional behavioral assessment201.2(h) 198General procedures for suspensions/removals of students201.7 203w/disabilitiesGeneral requirement for manifestation review.201.4(a) 200Illegal drug201.2(i) 198Impartial hearing officer201.2(j) 198Individuals to carry out review (manifestation)201.4(b) 201Interim alternative educational setting or IAES201.2(k); 201.8(a) 199, 205Initial requirement to conduct assessment & develop plan or to201.3(a) 200review existing planManifestation determination201.4 200Parental notice of disciplinary removal201.7(a) 203Provision of services during suspensions201.10 208Purpose201.1 197Removal201.2(l) 199Removals other than suspensions201.9(b) 206Serious bodily injury201.2(m) 199Students presumed to have a disability for discipline purposes201.2(n); 201.5 199, 201Student with a disability201.2(o) 199Superintendent or superintendent of schools201.2(p) 199Superintendent's hearing201.2(q) 199Suspension201.2(r); 201.7; 200, 203201.9(a) & (c) 206Suspensions - provisions of services during201.10 208Ten school day suspension or removal201.7(c) 204Weapon201.2(s) 200
STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES
Section PageAbuse, prevention of, students in residential placement200.15 152Academic achievement, functional performance and learning characteristics200.1(ww)(3)(i)(a) 12Accounting requirements for approved programs200.9(d) 126Adaptive behavior200.1(a) 1Adapted physical education200.1(b) 1Admission to public schools of students residing in institutions200.11 146Aging out200.4(i) 60Alternative format materials200.2(b)(10), 200.2(i) 22, 31Amendments to the IEP200.4(g) 58Annual review200.1(c); 200.16(g) 1, 164200.4(f) 57Appeal to a State review officer200.5(k) 88Approval of services200.2(d) 26Approval of orders of the Family Court200.8(a) 121Approved private school200.1(d) 1Assistive technology device200.1(e) 1Assistive technology service200.1(f) 1Autism200.1(zz)(1) 13Autism, educational programs for students with200.13 149Aversive Intervention200.1(lll); 200.7(b)(8) 18, 112Aversive Intervention - child-specific exception to use200.22(e) 189Aversive Intervention - program standards200.22(f) 191Behavioral Intervention Plan200.1(mmm); 200.22(b) 18, 185Behavioral Interventions - program standards200.22 184Blind, deaf, & severely physically disturbed students - appointment to200.7(d) 114State-operated and State-supported schoolsBoard of education responsibilities200.2 18Board policy200.2(b) 20Business day200.1(n)(2) 3Census and register of students with disabilities200.2(a)(1) 18Change in program200.1(g) 2Change in placement200.1(h) 2Class size200.1(i) 2Close-down period procedures - private programs200.9(g) 143Committee on Preschool Special Education (CPSE)200.1(j), 200.3 2, 32Committee on Special Education (CSE)200.1(k), 200.3 2, 32Complaint procedures200.5(l) 88Confidentiality of personally identifiable data200.5(e) 73Consent200.1(l); 200.5(b) 2, 68Consultant teacher services200.1(m); 200.6(d) 3, 96Continuum of Services200.6; 200.16(i) 94, 167Continuum of Services - co-teaching200.6(g) 98Data Collection200.2(a)(3) 19Data Reporting200.2(a)(4) 19Data Requirements200.2(a)(2) 19Days200.1(n) 3Day treatment programs certified by office of Mental Health200.14 150Deafness200.1(zz)(2) 14Deaf-blindness200.1(zz)(3) 14Declassification200.4(d)(1)(iii) 46Direct consultant teacher services200.1(m)(1); 200.6(d)(2) 3, 96 District plans200.2 (c); 24Due process complaint notification requirements200.5(i) 78Due process procedures200.5 66Educational programs for preschool students w/disabilities200.16 158Educational programs for students with autism200.13 149Eligibility determinations200.4(c) 45 Eligibility of students w/disabilities - day treatment200.14(b) 150Eligibility - preschool200.16(a) 158Emergency Interventions200.22(d) 188Emotional disturbance200.1(zz)(4) 14Evaluation - preschool200.16(c) 159Extracurricular participation200.2(b)(1) 21Financial reporting requirements for approved programs200.9(e) 127Fiscal year200.1(o) 3Fiscal audits200.18 174Full-day preschool program200.1(p) 3Full-day session200.1(q) 4Functional behavioral assessment200.1(r) 4General curriculum200.1(t) 4Group instruction200.1(ww)(3)(ii) 13Grouping for instruction - day treatment200.14(f) 151Guardian ad litem200.1(s) 4Half-day preschool program200.1(u) 4Half-day session200.1(v) 4Hearing impairment200.1(zz)(5) 14Highly qualified personnel200.2(i)(2) 32Home and hospital instruction200.1(w); 200.6(i) 4, 101Homeless youth200.1(hhh) 17IEP components200.4(d)(2) 46IEP implementation200.4(e) 53Impartial due process hearings200.5(i) 80Impartial hearing officer200.1(x) 5Impartial hearing officer rates200.21(a) 183Impartial hearing officer - suspension/revocation of certification200.21(b) 183Independent evaluation200.1(z); 200.5(g) 6, 75Independent evaluation - preschool200.16(d)(3) 160Independent education evaluations200.5(g) 75Indirect consultant teacher services200.1(m)(2) 3Individual evaluation200.1(aa); 200.4(b); 6, 39 200.16(c) 159Individual evaluation - day treatment programs200.14(c) 151Individualized education program (IEP)200.1(y); 200.4(d)(2) 6, 46Individualized education program (IEP) - preschool200.16(e)(3) 161Individual psychological evaluation200.1(bb) 6Ineligible200.4(d)(1) 46Interim Alternative Education Setting (IAES)200.6(n) 108Interpreting services200.1(nnn) 18Justification for proposed expenditures for State aid200.10(a-n) 144Learning disability200.1(zz)(6) 15Learning disabilities - additional procedures for identifying200.4(j) 63Least restrictive environment (LRE)200.1(cc) 7Levels of service200.6 (l) 108Limited English proficient student200.1(iii) 17Maintenance of lists200.2(e) 26Management needs200.1(ww)(3)(i)(d) 13Mediation200.5(h) 76Mediator200.1(dd) 7Medical services200.1(ee) 7Meeting notice200.5(c) 71Mental retardation200.1(zz)(7) 15Multiple disabilities200.1(zz)(8) 15Native language200.1(ff) 7Notice of closing, transfer of ownership, voluntary termination - privateschools 200.7(e) 121Notice of meetings200.5(c) 71Occupational therapy200.1(gg) 8Operation & administration of private schools & State-operated200.7 (b) 111& State-supported schoolsOperational & administrative provisions-private schools200.7(c) 113Orthopedic impairment200.1(zz)(9) 15Other health impairment200.1(zz)(10) 15Parent200.1(ii) 8Parent counseling & training200.1(kk); 200.6(h)(8); 8, 101200.13(d); 150 Parent participation in CSE meetings200.5(d) 72Participating agency200.1(jj) 8Pendency (Pending placement)200.4(e)(4); 56200.16(h)(3)(i) 165 Prevention of abuse - residential placements200.15 152Physical development200.1(ww)(3)(i) (c) 13Physical therapy200.1(ll) 9Preschool program200.1(nn); 200.16 10, 158Preschool program-approval, operation, and administration of200.20 176Preschool - provision of service200.16(e) 163Preschool student with a disability200.1(mm) 9Prior notice200.1(oo); 200.5(a) 10, 66Private Schools - approval200.7(a) 109Private schools, in-state or out-of-state200.6(i) 102Private/state-operated or -supported schools - standards200.7 109Procedural due process - preschool200.16(h) 165Procedural safeguards notice200.5(f) 74Procedures for referral, evaluation, individualized education program (IEP)200.4 36development, placement, and reviewProfessional Development Plan200.2(h) 31Program Standards for education programs - private200.7 109schools and State-operated or -supported schoolsRange of achievement in special class200.6(h)(7) 101Recommendation (IEP)200.4(d) 46Recommendation (IEP) - day treatment200.14(d) 151Recommendation (IEP) - preschool200.16(e) 161Referral200.4(a) 36Referral - preschool students200.16(b) 158Regular education teacher200.1(pp) 10Reimbursement - public school district administrative costs & due200.17 171process costsReimbursement rates for approved programs200.9(f) 130Reimbursement to certain state-operated and state-supported200.10 144schools for blind, deaf and severely disabledReimbursement to preschool programs200.19 176Related services200.1(qq); 200.6(e) 11, 96Requests for information to the CSE from Family Court, probation, etc.200.4(h) 59Residential school200.4(d)(4)(b) 52Resource room programs200.1(rr); 200.6(f) 11, 97Responsibility of BOE contracting with another BOE200.2(f) 27Responsibility of boards of cooperative educational services (BOCES)200.2(i) 31Responsibility of BOCES for special education space requirement plans200.2(g) 27School day200.1(n)(1) 3School health services200.1(ss) 11Similarity of need200.6(a)(3) 94Social development200.1(ww)(i)(b) 12Social history200.1(tt) 13Special classes200.1(uu); 200.6(g) 12, 98Special education200.1(ww) 12Special education provider200.1(xx) 13Special education space requirement plans200.2(g) 27Special education teacher200.1(yy) 13Special factors (consideration of)200.4(d)(3) 51Specially-designed instruction200.1(vv) 12Speech-impairment200.1(zz)(11) 15Staffing requirements200.6(b) 95State assistance for instruction of students with disabilities200.8 121State assistance for transportation of students w/disabilities200.12 148State complaint procedures200.5(l) 88State-operated and supported schools - standards for educational programs200.7 109Student progress reports - day treatment200.14(e) 151Student's status during proceedings - see also pendency200.5(m) 91Student with a disability200.1(zz) 13Subcommittee200.3(c);200.4(e)(2)(ii) 34, 54Submission of claims200.8(c) 122Substantial regression200.1(aaa) 16Supplementary aids and services200.1(bbb) 16Supplementary School Personnel200.1(hh) 8 Surrogate parent200.1(ccc); 200.5(n) 16, 92Tests & assessment procedures200.4(b)(6)(i) 42Timeline - IEP implementation200.4(e) 53Transition services200.1(fff);200.4(d)(2)(ix) 17, 50Transitional support services200.1(ddd); 200.6(c) 16, 96Transportation, state assistance200.12 148Traumatic brain injury200.1(zz)(12) 15Travel training200.1(ggg) 17Tuition - definitions200.9(a) 124Tuition rates200.9 124Twelve-month special service and/or program200.1(eee); 200.6(k) 16, 106Universal design200.1(jjj) 17Use of time-out rooms200.22 (c) 186Visual impairment200.1(zz)(13) 16Waiver200.6(l) 107Ward of the State200.1(kkk) 18Withdrawing a referral200.4(a)(7) 38Written notice - upon graduation or aging out200.4(i) 60Written policy200.2(b) 20PART 201 PROCEDURAL SAFEGUARDS FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIESSUBJECT TO DISCIPLINESection PageBehavioral intervention plan201.2(a) 197Change in placement - IHO authority201.8 205Change in placement - involving weapons, Illegal drugs or controlledsubstances 201.7(e) 204Committee on Special Education or CSE201.2(b) 197Controlled substance201.2(c) 197Coordination w/superintendent's hearing and other due process201.9 206procedures applicable to all studentsCSE responsibilities for expedited evaluations201.6 203CSE responsibilities for functional behavioral assessments &201.3 200intervention plansDefinitions201.2 197 Day (Calendar)201.2(d) 197Determination (manifestation)201.4(d) 201Deficiencies in IEP or Placement (manifestation)201.4(e) 201Disciplinary change in placement201.2(e) 198Discipline for students presumed to have a disability201.5 201Exception for pattern of suspensions or removals201.7(d) 204Expedited due process hearing201.2(f); 201.11 198, 209Expedited evaluation201.2(g) 198Five school day suspension or removal201.7(b) 200Functional behavioral assessment201.2(h) 198General procedures for suspensions/removals of students201.7 203w/disabilitiesGeneral requirement for manifestation review.201.4(a) 200Illegal drug201.2(i) 198Impartial hearing officer201.2(j) 198Individuals to carry out review (manifestation)201.4(b) 201Interim alternative educational setting or IAES201.2(k); 201.8(a) 199, 205Initial requirement to conduct assessment & develop plan or to201.3(a) 200review existing planManifestation determination201.4 200Parental notice of disciplinary removal201.7(a) 203Provision of services during suspensions201.10 208Purpose201.1 197Removal201.2(l) 199Removals other than suspensions201.9(b) 206Serious bodily injury201.2(m) 199Students presumed to have a disability for discipline purposes201.2(n); 201.5 199, 201Student with a disability201.2(o) 199Superintendent or superintendent of schools201.2(p) 199Superintendent's hearing201.2(q) 199Suspension201.2(r); 201.7; 200, 203201.9(a) & (c) 206Suspensions - provisions of services during201.10 208Ten school day suspension or removal201.7(c) 204Weapon201.2(s) 200
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS LISTED BELOW:
INTRODUCTION TO APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS: Presented by Allison Schear, MA, BCBA Dates: February 11th 2008 Time: 10-2:30 Cost: $50.00 Location: The ELIJA Foundation Library 665. N. Newbridge Rd Levittown NY 11756 This workshop is geared towards those who are new to the field of Applied Behavior Analysis. It takes an in depth look at the basic principles of ABA including mand training, functional behavior assessment, principles of reinforcement, behavior treatment, and data based decision making. Attendees will get a hands on experience with how to apply these principles in the education and treatment of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Please Call Effective Interventions to sign up for this workshop 516 433 4202 OR you may Click here for mail in form http://www.effectiveinterventions.com/Introaba1daymail.htmlClick here for Online Credit Card Form http://elija.org/introaba2007cc.html--------------------------------------------------------------------February 25th 2008 RESPITE/CAREGIVER WORKSHOP Hosted by ELIJA Foundation , Presented by EFFECTIVE INTERVENTIONS Maria Visco BCaBA & Allison Schear MA, BCBA COST 30.00 TIME: 10 to 1 LOCATION: ELIJA HOUSE LIBRARY 665 N Newbridge Rd Levittown NY 11756 516 433 4321 - PLEASE pre register Space is Limited This workshop is geared toward respite and caregiver providers . It is designed to provide basic information on autism, specifically in pre school and school age children. It also offers an introduction to Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and describes how ABA can be useful in teaching appropriate independent and social behaviors, including language. Lastly, some strategies for dealing with problem behavior using the principles of ABA are discussed. Click here for MAIL IN RESPITE WORKSHOP REGISTRATION http://www.effectiveinterventions.com/respite1daymail.html Click here for Credit Card Registration Form http://elija.org/respite2007cc.htmlMarch 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------SAVE THE DATE: MARCH 1st 2008 MANAGING CHALLENGING BEHAVIORS Presented By: Dr. Tony Hollander Time 10 am to 4 pm Location:The Residence Inn by MarriottMedia Center 9 Gerhard Rd. Plainview NY 11803 Cost: 50.00 for ELIJA Members 75.00 for NON ELIJA Members 100.00 For LATE or Walk In (Late is February 16 2008 Boxed Lunch is included, Those with dietary Restrictions are encouraged to bring their own lunch or call for arrangements ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Dr. Hollander has been working with the Autism Spectrum population for well over 30 years. He has been instrumental in developing models for in-school programs, after school programs, in and out of home respite care, emergency/crisis intervention, parent training, and conducting educational programs/schools as demonstration projects. In addition, he has published several articles, contributed to many other articles, contributed to several training movies, conducted many grants and service programs, and has been an active professor for his entire career. Currently, he is the Director/President of the New York Institute for Applied Behavior Management (www.NYIABM.org), the Director of the SD Behavior Analysis Team, consultant for many schools across the country, contributor to journals, magazines, and a blog, and conducts workshops across the country. DESCRIPTION: LEARNING OBJECTIVES: participants will learn how to - employ the Least Restrictive Environment intervention strategies employ the Most Restrictive Environment intervention strategies understand conditions for both safety and determining viable strategies be able to employ strategies for a variety of behavioral categories such as: social skills, language skills, fine and gross motor skills, activities of daily living skills, and pre-vocational skills objectification process of behavior understand a data-based approach to treatment understand task analysis and task mastery develop an appreciation for underlying perceptual-motor-cognitive deficits that hamper good learning To REGISTER VIA MAIL: MAIL IN http://elija.org/hollander2008.htmlFor Online Credit Card: Credit Card http://elija.org/hollandercc2008.html--------------------------------------------------------------------Date: March 24-28, 2008 ABA 5-DAY TRAINING : Teaching children with Autism Using Applied Behavior Analysis Times/ Schedule: Mon-Wed: 10:00 - 2:00 Thurs and Fri: 11:00-2:30 Cost: $375 , including light refreshments Presented by:Effective Interventions Allison Shear, MA, BCBA, Maria Visco, MA, BCaBA Where: ELIJA Library, 665 N. Newbridge Rd., Levittown, NY 11756 Participants will learn about : The core deficit s in Autism , The basic principles behind ABA and how it applies to teaching children with Autism, How to build a rapport with a new or unwilling learner, The different modalities in teaching communication and verbal behavior, Behavior management, reduction and replacement strategies Includes 2 days of hands on training Must attend all 5 days for certificate of attendance Register today! CLICK HERE FOR ONLINE REGISTRATION http://www.effectiveinterventions.com/aba5daycc.htmlCLICK HERE FOR MAIL IN REGISTRATION http://www.effectiveinterventions.com/aba5daymail.htmlor call Mary Campanella at 433-4202 APRIL 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------Date: April 5, 2008 Cost: $50 Non-members, $75 Members $100 Late/Walk-in Venue: Marriott Residence Inn, 3rd Floor Solarium A The Presenters: John C. Barnard, MScEd and John McElwee, M.S., BCBA Time: 8:30 Registration, 9-4:00 Title: The Evolution and Curriculum Development for Individuals with Autism and The Challenges of Providing Behavior Support within a Home-bases Setting AM DESCRIPTION: The Evolution of Curriculum Development for Individuals with Autism As the array of behaviorally based instructional strategies for autism has evolved and expanded since the publication of Lovaas et al. (1987), distinctive labels have often been applied to instructional innovations in a manner that implies radically different intervention packages. This presentation will discuss some of the similarities and differences between different curriculum approaches. The history and characteristics of Discrete Trial Instruction, Applied Verbal Behavior and PECS will be reviewed and some general analytic principles towards effective curriculum sequencing will be proposed. PM DESCRIPTION: The Challenges of Providing Behavioral Support within a Home-based Setting Individuals with autism require a specialized and individualized approach to education. Whether the student receives instructional programming in a home-based or school-based setting, there is an ongoing need for the coordination of behavioral and communication goals into the home. This training will provide suggestions for parents on how best to integrate visual schedules and behavioral intervention strategies within the home routine. Common difficulties with the coordination of educational services across settings will be presented. Suggestions based upon clinical experience will be provided for both parents and professionals. A review of functional assessment procedures will also be included with this presentation in order to emphasize the importance of providing the appropriate level and type of support in the home setting. Bios: John McElwee is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) with charter member status. He received his MSc from the University of Calgary in 1970 and has over 30 years experience as an applied behavior analyst. John's primary area of interest remains early intensive behavioral intervention for young children with autism and he has become a frequent conference presenter on the potential impact of the principles of relational frame theory upon common approaches to curriculum development. John is an approved provider for BCBA CEU's. John C. Barnard is an experienced behavioral consultant who has worked in a variety of capacities alongside many respected professionals in the field. He has provided ongoing training and consultation to both home-based and center-based programs for children with autism across the country. He is an experienced conference presenter whose clinical interests include individualized and comprehensive curriculum development, early intensive behavioral intervention for children with autism and the provision of best practice consultation services to students with developmental disabilities within the public school setting. Register Via Mail http://elija.org/rtfapril2008.htmlRegister ONLINE by Credit Card http://elija.org/rftapril2008cc.html------------------------MAY 2008 SAVE THE DATE ELIJA SCHOOL's GOLF AND TENNIS CLASSIC!AT THE FRESH MEADOW COUNTRY CLUB IN LAKE SUCCESShttp://www.elijaschool.org/outing2008.htmlJULY 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------Date: July 18, 2008 Cost: $40 members, $50 non-members $75 late/walkin Venue: Marriott Residence Inn, Media Center Time: 9-4 Presenter: Peter Gerhardt, Ed. D Title: Transitioning into Life ABSTRACT Today, professionals, families and learners with ASD are beginning to redefine the outcomes of the transition process beyond simple job placement to focus on career development and measures of personal competence and life satisfaction. To this end, this presentation will provide an overview and practical suggestions for transition planning in support of desirable and individualized employment outcomes with attention to assessment, community based training, employment development, job-related social skills and quality of life concerns. Workshop Objectives After having attended this workshop, participants will be able to: Identify the components of a comprehensive transition plan Define the multiple constituent groups whose needs are to be meet in the employment development process Discuss the important of co-worker training in employment maintenance. Describe the individually determined components of an assessment of quality of life BIO: Dr. Peter Gerhardt is President of the Organization for Autism Research, a nonprofit organization, the mission of which is to fund applied research and disseminate the relevant findings in support of learners with Autism Spectrum Disorders and their families. Dr. Gerhardt has over 25 years experience utilizing the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis in support of adolescents and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders in educational, employment, and community based settings. He is the author or co-author of articles and book chapters on the needs of adults with autism spectrum disorder, the school-to-work-transition process, assessment of social competence, and analysis and intervention of problematic behavior. He has presented nationally and internationally on these topics. Dr. Gerhardt received his doctorate from the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. Dr. Gerhardt was recently awarded the John W. Jacobson Award for Significant Contributions to Effective Behavior Intervention by New York State ABA. Dr. Gerhardt has been an active member of Maryland ABA since relocating to Maryland (from New Jersey) 6 years ago and he is currently the President-Elect. Previously, he had served on the Board of Directors on New York State ABA and was a founding director of Connecticut ABA. Registration by mail http://www.elija.org/peterg2008.htmlRegister ONLINE by Credit Card http://www.elija.org/peterg2008cc.htmlSEE SOME MORE INFORMATION ON OUR PILOT FAMILY SUPPORT SERVICES BELOW! SORRY FOR THE CROSS POST ON THIS ONE, WE DONT WANT TO MISS ANYONE!www.elija.orgProudly offers our community THERAPEUTIC CREATIVE ARTS FAMILY SUPPORTServing Parents, Siblings and Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder with therapeutic art & music sessions geared toward supporting the emotional and social needs of families affected by Autism.Pilot Sibling Sessions: Approximately 2 hours long, there will be AM & PM sessionsFee: Voluntary DonationLocation: The ELIJA House 665 N. Newbridge Rd. Levittown NY 11756Potential Schedule FOR SIBLING PILOT: AM = 10:00- 12:00 PM = 12:30 - 2:30(Pilot commencing in April 2008 on select Saturdays for approx. 8 Saturdays - Dates TBD)The pilot will provide the typical sibling participants approximately 1 hour of Art Therapy & 1 hour of Music Therapy With Board Certified & Licensed Art & Music Therapists for small group Saturday SessionsOur pilot program will initially service SIBLINGS ONLY, however, based on interest and funding we are aiming to form classes for the entire family (those with ASD and Parents) to participate either simultaneously or during different times throughout the week. We do not have a date when these additional programs will be available. Please supply us with some information which will help us service your family appropriately.PLEASE NOTE: The ELIJA Foundation is committed to this initiative and we thank you all for your input and interest . ELIJA will be sponsoring the SIBLING pilot and contingent on future funding, we will create additional groups for individuals with Autism. ELIJA understands the unique needs of those with ASD's and only wish to provide a therapeutic & purposeful environment for them. We thank you for your patience while we design a creative arts program specifically for them, and do hope you will consider your typical siblings for our pilot to this program initiative.--------------------------Please Mail / Fax or Email this information_____________________We would be interested in having our typical child(ren) (sibling(s) of an Autistic child) participating in your Creative Arts Family Support ProgramWe are interested in having our (no age limit):O _______ # Typical Sibling(s) participate Age(s)_________________________ We would be interested in having them attend (check both if you can do either): AM session ________ PM Session ________ THE INFORMATION BELOW IS FOR FUTURE GROUPS, AND /OR for families with only children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (no age limit)O _______ # Individuals with Autism Age(s) _______________________________O _______ # Parent(s)/Caregiver Note relationship(s):____________________________________________________We would be interested in attending (check both if you can do either)________ Saturday AM Sessions (10-12) ________ Saturday PM Sessions (12:30-2:30)Additional Comments: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________CONTACT INFORMATION: NAME_________________________________________EMAIL____________________PH_______________________ADDRESS:____________________________________________________________________________________FAX TO : 516 433 4324 EMAIL TO: elija@optonline.net MAIL: ELIJA FAMILY SUPPORT 665 N. Newbridge Rd. Levittown NY 11756
THE REBECCA CENTER PRESENTS Revolutionizing Education & Treatment in Autism on Long Island:
THE REBECCA CENTER
Presents
Revolutionizing Education & Treatment in Autism on Long Island:
The Developmental, Individual difference,
Relationship-based Approach
(DIR/Floortime®)
Lecturers include:
Gil Tippy, Psy.D. - Clinical Psychologist
Alex Klein- Floortime Coach
John Carpente, MA, MT-BC, NRMT, LCAT- Music Therapist
Pioneered by Drs. Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder, the DIR® Model is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach that focuses on the emotional development of children with ASDs. It takes into account the child's feelings, relationships with caregivers, developmental capacities and individual differences (child's ability to process and respond to sensory information). It focuses on the child's skills in all developmental areas, including social-emotional functioning, communication, thinking and learning, motor skills, body awareness, and attention.
This presentation will focus on introducing participants to the theoretical foundation of DIR®/Floortime. Clinical video excerpts will be used to illustrate DIR principles, strategies and techniques, including: clinical application, assessment, and parent & Teacher training.
ü Who should attend? Parents, Teachers, Occupational & Physical Therapists, Speech Therapists, Psychologists, Creative Arts Therapists and Program & School Administrators.
ü When? Thursday, April 24, 2008 @ 7 pm – 9pm
ü Where? Molloy College, 1000 Hempstead Ave., Rockville Centre, N.Y 11571, Reception Room in Kellenberg
ü Cost? Rebecca Center members (Parents) $10 pp. Non-members $25 pp. Molloy Students and Faculty
free admission with ID
ü Contact: Email: jcarpente@erols.com Web: www.therebeccacenter.org
seating is limited. early registration is encouraged
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Please make checks payable to The Rebecca Center for Music Therapy
C/o Molloy College
1000 Hempstead Ave., Rockville Centre, N.Y. 11571
Name:_____________________________________
Email:___________________________________
Phone:__________________________ How many will attend?____________
Member $10 pp. _____ Non-member $25 pp. _______Molloy Student/Faculty
______Total Amount:________
John A. Carpente, MA, MT-BC, NRMT, LCAT Founder/Executive Director Rebecca Center for Music Therapy, Rockville Centre, N.Y. www.therebeccacenter.org 516-678-5000 ext. 6643 Faculty & Projects Coordinator Music & Music Therapy Dept. Molloy College, Rockville Centre, N.Y. www.molloy.edu 516-678-5000 ext. 6192 Coordinator - Center for Music and Child Development Rebecca School, New York, N.Y. www.rebeccaschool.org 212-810-4120
Presents
Revolutionizing Education & Treatment in Autism on Long Island:
The Developmental, Individual difference,
Relationship-based Approach
(DIR/Floortime®)
Lecturers include:
Gil Tippy, Psy.D. - Clinical Psychologist
Alex Klein- Floortime Coach
John Carpente, MA, MT-BC, NRMT, LCAT- Music Therapist
Pioneered by Drs. Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder, the DIR® Model is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach that focuses on the emotional development of children with ASDs. It takes into account the child's feelings, relationships with caregivers, developmental capacities and individual differences (child's ability to process and respond to sensory information). It focuses on the child's skills in all developmental areas, including social-emotional functioning, communication, thinking and learning, motor skills, body awareness, and attention.
This presentation will focus on introducing participants to the theoretical foundation of DIR®/Floortime. Clinical video excerpts will be used to illustrate DIR principles, strategies and techniques, including: clinical application, assessment, and parent & Teacher training.
ü Who should attend? Parents, Teachers, Occupational & Physical Therapists, Speech Therapists, Psychologists, Creative Arts Therapists and Program & School Administrators.
ü When? Thursday, April 24, 2008 @ 7 pm – 9pm
ü Where? Molloy College, 1000 Hempstead Ave., Rockville Centre, N.Y 11571, Reception Room in Kellenberg
ü Cost? Rebecca Center members (Parents) $10 pp. Non-members $25 pp. Molloy Students and Faculty
free admission with ID
ü Contact: Email: jcarpente@erols.com Web: www.therebeccacenter.org
seating is limited. early registration is encouraged
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Please make checks payable to The Rebecca Center for Music Therapy
C/o Molloy College
1000 Hempstead Ave., Rockville Centre, N.Y. 11571
Name:_____________________________________
Email:___________________________________
Phone:__________________________ How many will attend?____________
Member $10 pp. _____ Non-member $25 pp. _______Molloy Student/Faculty
______Total Amount:________
John A. Carpente, MA, MT-BC, NRMT, LCAT Founder/Executive Director Rebecca Center for Music Therapy, Rockville Centre, N.Y. www.therebeccacenter.org 516-678-5000 ext. 6643 Faculty & Projects Coordinator Music & Music Therapy Dept. Molloy College, Rockville Centre, N.Y. www.molloy.edu 516-678-5000 ext. 6192 Coordinator - Center for Music and Child Development Rebecca School, New York, N.Y. www.rebeccaschool.org 212-810-4120
Friday, February 15, 2008
Transition Conference sponsored by Compass /JCCA - March 16 at CW Post
Information and ideas for young
people with learning disabilities
and on the autism spectrum ...
and their parents.
Get Ready,
Get Set,
GO!
An exploration of opportunities for
young adults with learning disabilities
or on the autism spectrum
...and their parents
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
9:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Hillwood Commons (top of the Commons)
CW Post Campus, 720 Northern Blvd.
Brookville, L.I.
9:00 AM
Registration and Breakfast
9:30-10:30 AM
Keynote: Getting Ready for school success
and the transition to adulthood: Social and
academic development and strategies to
increase success. Matthew Cruger, Ph.D.,
pediatric neuropsychologist at the Learning
and Achievement Institute, NYU Child Study
Center
10:45-11:45
Presentations from School
Representatives
11:45-12:45
Breakout sessions:
For Parents: What You Need to Know: Vesid
and Helpful Info from Our Legal Expert
For Students: What to Expect: A Presentation
from Our College Student Panel
12:45-1:00
Questions and Answers, Feedback
Colleges and technical schools
represented include:
Adelphi University
Garden City, NY
Barry Tech
Westbury, NY
Briarcliff College
Bethpage, NY
CSB School of Broadcasting
Westbury, NY
C.W. Post Campus, Long Island University
Brookville, NY
Cody Center, Stonybrook University
Stonybrook, NY
Culinary Academy of Long Island
Syosset, NY
Five Towns College
Dix Hills, NY
Gersh Academy
Hauppauge, NY
Hunter Busines School
Levittown, NY
Katherine Gibbs School
Melville, NY
Kulanu
Cedarhurst, NY
Nasau Community College: The Achilles
Program
Uniondale, NY
New York Institute of Technology
Vocational Independence Program
Islip, NY
Quensborough College (CUNY)
Bayside, NY
Additional Information will be available from:
Vocational Educational Services For
Individuals with Disabilities
Hempstead, NY
To register,
please return this form to:
Evan Oppenheimer, Case Manager
Jewish Child Care Association
45 Manetto Hill Road, Plainview, NY 11803
email: oppenheimere@jccany.org
Name:
Address:
Phone Number:
Email:
For students:
Name:
Age: Grade:
Cost: $25 per person, or $40 for one
parent and one student (includes Kosher
breakfast)
Please make checks payable to
JCCA/Compass Program
Space is limited.
Please register early!
If you have questions or would like
to learn more about the Compass
Project, please contact: Elise
Hahn-Felix, Director 516-729-0066
or email felixe@jccany.org
www.jccany.org/compass
people with learning disabilities
and on the autism spectrum ...
and their parents.
Get Ready,
Get Set,
GO!
An exploration of opportunities for
young adults with learning disabilities
or on the autism spectrum
...and their parents
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
9:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Hillwood Commons (top of the Commons)
CW Post Campus, 720 Northern Blvd.
Brookville, L.I.
9:00 AM
Registration and Breakfast
9:30-10:30 AM
Keynote: Getting Ready for school success
and the transition to adulthood: Social and
academic development and strategies to
increase success. Matthew Cruger, Ph.D.,
pediatric neuropsychologist at the Learning
and Achievement Institute, NYU Child Study
Center
10:45-11:45
Presentations from School
Representatives
11:45-12:45
Breakout sessions:
For Parents: What You Need to Know: Vesid
and Helpful Info from Our Legal Expert
For Students: What to Expect: A Presentation
from Our College Student Panel
12:45-1:00
Questions and Answers, Feedback
Colleges and technical schools
represented include:
Adelphi University
Garden City, NY
Barry Tech
Westbury, NY
Briarcliff College
Bethpage, NY
CSB School of Broadcasting
Westbury, NY
C.W. Post Campus, Long Island University
Brookville, NY
Cody Center, Stonybrook University
Stonybrook, NY
Culinary Academy of Long Island
Syosset, NY
Five Towns College
Dix Hills, NY
Gersh Academy
Hauppauge, NY
Hunter Busines School
Levittown, NY
Katherine Gibbs School
Melville, NY
Kulanu
Cedarhurst, NY
Nasau Community College: The Achilles
Program
Uniondale, NY
New York Institute of Technology
Vocational Independence Program
Islip, NY
Quensborough College (CUNY)
Bayside, NY
Additional Information will be available from:
Vocational Educational Services For
Individuals with Disabilities
Hempstead, NY
To register,
please return this form to:
Evan Oppenheimer, Case Manager
Jewish Child Care Association
45 Manetto Hill Road, Plainview, NY 11803
email: oppenheimere@jccany.org
Name:
Address:
Phone Number:
Email:
For students:
Name:
Age: Grade:
Cost: $25 per person, or $40 for one
parent and one student (includes Kosher
breakfast)
Please make checks payable to
JCCA/Compass Program
Space is limited.
Please register early!
If you have questions or would like
to learn more about the Compass
Project, please contact: Elise
Hahn-Felix, Director 516-729-0066
or email felixe@jccany.org
www.jccany.org/compass
"Hyperscanning" Study Reveals Impaired Sense of Self in Autism
Scientists last week reported an exciting innovation for autism researchin a study that scanned the brains of people with autism during socialinteractions. The study, funded in part by Autism Speaks, revealed areduced brain signal in people with autism that might be related totheir sense of self. The study appeared as the cover article in thehigh-profile journal Neuron, and heralds a new tool for understandingwhy individuals with autism have difficulty in social interactions."It's the first time anyone's actually engaged kids with autism in asocial exchange as they're being scanned," said first author Pearl Chiu,Ph.D., of the Computational Psychiatry Unit (CPU) at Baylor College ofMedicine. While scanning people with autism using functional magneticresonance imaging (fMRI) is commonplace, this study goes further bymonitoring their brain activity while they interact with another person.In fact, both people's brains were scanned simultaneously, using amethod called "hyperscanning" which was pioneered by the senior authorof the study and director of the CPU, P. Read Montague, Ph.D.Hyperscanning allows scientists to "eavesdrop on both brains at once,"said Dr. Montague, providing essential data for understanding the neuralunderpinnings of social exchange.To study social interactions in the confined space of a fMRI scannerwhere it is crucial for the head to remain still, subjects in separatescanners played an interactive trust game while watching screens andusing toggle buttons to relay their responses to each other, in a setupreminiscent of online video gaming. This trust game involves exchangesof money between two players, and has been used to characterize andquantify reciprocal interactions between people. "It's designed to probesocial exchange, social interaction, reciprocity, and sensing andresponding to social signals," said Dr. Montague.The new study found that adolescent boys with high-functioning autismcould understand and play the game successfully, performing similarly toage- and IQ-matched controls. Even though their game playing was normal,however, their brain activity was not. Scanning during the task revealedunusually quiet activity in a portion of the cingulate cortex, a part ofthe brain thought to mediate social cognition. This occurred just afterthe autistic individual decided on the amount of money to give to hispartner in the other scanner. In contrast, control subjects displayedhigh activity in the same situation. This particular brain activity wastermed a "self response" because it occurred whenever a person made adecision of their own, but not when presented with the decision of theirpartner.The discrepancy between normal game playing and abnormal brain signalspoints to key differences in how the subjects with autism processed thesocial interaction. "It's almost as though they can mimic what needs tooccur in a social interaction, but the deeper attribution of thatinteraction to themselves is absent," said Dr. Chiu, who also pointedout that each subject had been in intensive behavioral therapy to learnappropriate social behaviors. The diminished "self responses" in theindividuals with autism resembled the decreased responses observed incontrol subjects when they play a computer that does not reciprocate asa human would, said Dr. Montague.The researchers speculate that the decreased self responses reflect animpaired sense of self in autism, which could lead to difficulties innavigating social situations. For example, making good guesses aboutanother person's intent is a key skill during a social interaction, andthis ability likely draws from awareness of one's own intentions.Consistent with this idea, the strength of the "self responses" in theindividuals with autism correlated with their symptom severity: thosewith the most reduced "self response" activity had the most severesymptoms in the social and communication domains.The brain circuitry that mediates social behavior is still a mystery,which is why Dr. Montague's technique is so important. The innovativecombination of game playing and hyperscanning can effectively probe thesocial difficulties that are some of the most defining features ofautism. Now that social interactions can be imaged inside the lab, thesepowerful techniques-with a willing cadre of volunteers with autism-canbegin to examine the brain mechanisms of social exchange, leading to abetter understanding of why people with autism struggle in socialsituations. The more we understand why individuals with autism havedifficulty in social interaction, the better we will be able to designinterventions that can help overcome this difficulty.-Michele Solis, Ph.D.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
