The federal government dropped a bombshell about autism today, reporting that 1 in 91 children are diagnosed with the disorder.
The news isn’t just for the disability community. It holds fundamental questions, and potential changes, for early learning because it means a lot more kids are lining up at child care centers and preschools with an autism diagnosis. Unfortunately, the web of autism services designed to help these children is already stretched well beyond breaking.
The problem is money. Universities are producing a stream of trained educators to serve this growing group, but there isn’t enough public money for recommended treatment and therapy in those classrooms, points out Ilene Schwartz, chair of the University of Washington’s Special Education department.
“It would be like saying you have the best trained surgeons, but you don’t have an operating room,” said Schwartz.
Autism treatment is expensive. It is often recommended that children under the age of eight with autism receive 25 hours of treatment a week, but the public program for babies and toddlers supports 1 ½ hours, Schwartz adds. The Seattle area’s leading centers for young children with autism – The Boyer Clinic and Kindering Center – can offer more because of their directors’ fundraising ability, Schwartz says.
This finding adds yet another twist to the early learning debate. As advocates scramble to find funding to match findings of the importance of quality early education, where are they going to find money to serve the growing number of kids who need this expensive autism therapy?
The survey also found the average age of diagnosis is falling. Does this mean mainstream child care centers should accept more children with milder cases of autism, and add trained staff to support this work? Once again, where will they find the money?
Finally, will the increasingly common autism diagnosis change the basic definition of disability?
The latest report that roughly one percent of children have autism will only fuel these types of questions because it means more parents are demanding services and greater public and private funding.
The research is also catching up with the public profile of the mystifying neurological disorder – there is no established cause or cure for autism – that grabbed the public’s attention this decade with a slew of magazine cover stories and more than one feature on “Oprah.”
Researchers did not offer any definitive conclusions about why the incidence of autism is rising. But, they suggested increasing public awareness and diagnosis, as well as the addition of Asperger’s Syndrome and pervasive development disorder could help explain the spike, according the survey jointly run by the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Today, the CDC rushed out a separate study with a similar finding that one percent of children “are affected with an” autism spectrum disorder.
The research appeared in Today’s online issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Pediatrics Association.