The Today Show

This morning the Today Show had a segment on an autistic child- more of an update on a child they've been reporting on. The child gets ABA, speech therapy, occupational therapy, special ed preschool, and about an hour a day in a regular preschool- he seemed to have a paraprofessional with him.

Its was a good segment, better than the normal "what is autism?" segments you see, because it shows these kids respond to therapies, and presented the therapies that were working for the child. It also did not even try to answer the question of cause, which I found very nice.

The fact that our school system does not have paraprofessionals for their inclusion classrooms is very disturbing. This leaves it up to each parent to request one for their child's IEP. Requesting anything for an IEP means going to war with the school- at least it always has before. Its a divide-and-conquer way of throwing away lives, and the casualities are not only our own self-worth and time, but more importantly, our children. Not just the disabled children.