Why IDEA Matters

Tsunami of autism cases crippling to Marin parents, school, is the headline for an article the January 3th Marin Independent Journal. With the number of autistic students in Marin having doubled in seven years---from 76 in 2001 to 152 in 2008----the school district finds itself straining to provide an appropriate education for the students, while parents find themselves scrambling. It's a familiar, if not too-familiar story over the past several years; it's certainly been the case for every school district that we have lived in, in numerous places around the country.

One thing to keep in mind is that it's only fairly recently that public school districts bothered to educate autistic students, or felt----or were legally mandated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)---to do so. My son is in an autism classroom in our town's middle school. It's a classroom that didn't exist until about two and a half years ago; indeed, the very thought of educating a child like Charlie would have been simply unthinkable, and even laughable. Charlie, I am quite sure, would have been long ago packed off to some institutional center or to a residential facility. No one would have known how to teach him, let alone would have thought he was teachable---as he most certainly is.

So while it feel like there's suddenly all these autistic students to provide an education for----so much that it seems there's a "tsunami" (an unfortunate choice of words with its connotations of disaster, destruction, and devastation, and used too often in reference to autism)----the shock is that they, and we, actually do have to provide an education for these kids. And we've needed to, all along.