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Super Dad
ParticipantREMINDER!
North Shore ASBC Lecture Series
The North Shore ASBC Support Group proudly presents:
Joint Attention and Social Stories
by
Hoa Chan, M.A., BCBA
Clinical Director of Tiny Talkers
at
7:00pm, Tues Oct 20
in the Cedar Room of the
West Vancouver Community CentreWe are very pleased to have Hoa Chan as the guest speaker at our upcoming session. She will talk about two topics that are very useful to parents of newly diagnosed children: joint attention and social stories. Hoa is uniquely qualified to discuss the latter, since she has previously conducted an experiment on social stories for her masters thesis.
DATE: Tuesday, Oct 20, 2009
TIME: 7 – 9 pm
LOCATION: Cedar Room, West Van Community Centre (2121 Marine Drive, near 21st Street)Coffee/Tea and snacks provided. Donations are greatly appreciated.
Please RSVP to Carol at colemanmoser@hotmail.com
Carol and Tony
(Co-facilitators for ASBC North Shore Group)ParticipantIf you have not looked at the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, I encourage you to do so. The Health section says States Parties shall:
Provide those health services needed by persons with disabilities specifically because of their disabilities, including early identification and intervention as appropriate, and services designed to minimize and prevent further disabilities
The Convention was written three years ago, and Canada still refuses to update our laws accordingly. While our government continues to trample on the rights of disabled children, 60 others have made such discrimination illegal in their countries. Many second-world and third-world countries are now ahead of us, including some that have been harshly criticized by Canada for their human rights records.
If you go out and ask Canadians what they think about human rights in our country, all of them will say they are proud of being a global human rights watchdog. I guess that means disabled children are not really human, and sub-human rights are a different story.
Participanthttp://www.thestar.com/comment/article/711632
U.S. can teach us how to care for autistic kids
October 18, 2009
Malcolm StanleyPresident Barack Obama has introduced a concept into the U.S. health-care debate that "no one should go bankrupt because they got sick."
Most Canadians listen to this rhetoric and smile, secure in the knowledge that for them this issue was solved a long time ago. But for some Canadians this platitude is as relevant as it is to their American cousins. They are going broke in the land of universal health care because someone in their family is sick.
My family and I moved to the United States a year ago, following employment opportunities that promptly vanished like spring flowers in the blizzard of the financial system meltdown.
Left precariously clinging to tenuous health-care insurance, we received an involuntary crash course in the very insecurities of being American that fuel the current U.S. health-care debate. Yet financially, when we balance our chequebook every month, we feel we are more secure and less likely to fail than we were before we left Canada.
How can this be? Well, we have a daughter with autism, a disorder that now strikes at least one in 100 children, seemingly at random. It cannot be tested for or prevented. Autism can prevent children from learning how to communicate, to socialize, to control their own body movements and functions.
Behavioural therapy is the only proven and effective treatment. In Canada, this therapy is provided by a patchwork quilt of provincial programs, all of which are resource constrained.
Rationing of care is the result. In Ontario, where we used to live, children proceed unpredictably from wait list to therapy, sometimes never actually receiving any help at all. Once they reach school age, they are dumped into a system that actually prevents their trained therapists from helping them to learn by barring them from the school building.
In this situation, many Canadian parents empty pocketbooks, mortgage houses and exhaust the kindness of relatives in a scramble to personally provide the behavioural therapy that helps to unlock the minds of their children from their uncooperative bodies. A disproportionate number live below the poverty line. Some go bankrupt.
It is hardly a glowing example of the universal care Canadians so smugly proclaim to their American cousins.
But wait. Now we are the American cousins. What a difference this makes. Before school started, our daughter received a complete program of scientifically validated behavioural therapy, arranged by the state of Pennsylvania, with no mentions of wait lists, benchmarked cut-offs or payment. Now in kindergarten, she receives in-school services and support from therapists with the same training as those who are barred from schools in Ontario.
How can these outcomes be so different for the same child when the clinical diagnosis used as a basis for the provisioning of services is precisely the same? I believe the answer lies in the very basis of our two societies.
Canada is founded on principles of peace, order and good government.
In Ontario, this translates into a benchmarks program that will withdraw therapeutic services from children with autism who do not show a sufficiently timely response to therapy. It is apparently a bureaucratic issue of the proper management of government spending.
If presented with a young Helen Keller, one wonders whether Ontario government-provided therapy services would be withdrawn. Would Keller ever have achieved her eureka moment if, instead of persistently holding Keller's hand under the pump, her therapist had been told to move on to another child with a more visible return on therapeutic investment?
The recent media coming-out party of Carly Fleischmann, who showed mixed indications of therapeutic progress for almost 10 years before flowering into a fearsomely articulate advocate for autistic children, is a local and compelling embodiment of the argument that this management-efficiency approach to providing autism services is misguided.
Counterintuitively, things are different in the United States. A nation founded upon the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness brings a persistent faith in the individual to the question of how to provide for autistic children. A simple trip of a moving truck has transformed the status of our daughter from that of an inconvenient provincial liability to that of a valued citizen with the right to demand assistance in her essential pursuit of happiness.
In Pennsylvania, her very existence demands that supports be provided, with the full force of the law and court system standing behind her.
These differences in the approach to the treatment of autistic children between our two nations call out the fact that the Canadian system is not the perfectly formed jewel it is often made out to be in comparison with the American system.
Families with children with autism should not go bankrupt. But in Ontario and other Canadian provinces, many do.
By allowing such bankruptcies to occur, policy at both the federal and provincial level reveals a hole in the safety net large enough for entire families to fall through.
It is a hole that America apparently started to patch up some time ago. Canadians have some work to do on their own safety net where it concerns helping and supporting children with autism and their families. There is no time like the present for that work to get started.
Malcolm Stanley advises telecommunications companies on product and service strategies. He currently lives with his family near Philadelphia.
ParticipantNorth Shore ASBC Lecture Series
The North Shore ASBC Support Group proudly presents:
Joint Attention and Social Stories
by
Hoa Chan, M.A., BCBA
Clinical Director of Tiny Talkers
at
7:00pm, Tues Oct 20
in the Cedar Room of the
West Vancouver Community CentreWe are very pleased to have Hoa Chan as the guest speaker at our upcoming session. She will talk about two topics that are very useful to parents of newly diagnosed children: joint attention and social stories. Hoa is uniquely qualified to discuss the latter, since she has previously conducted an experiment on social stories for her masters thesis.
DATE: Tuesday, Oct 20, 2009
TIME: 7 – 9 pm
LOCATION: Cedar Room, West Van Community Centre (2121 Marine Drive, near 21st Street)Coffee/Tea and snacks provided. Donations are greatly appreciated.
Please RSVP to Carol at colemanmoser@hotmail.com
Carol and Tony
(Co-facilitators for ASBC North Shore Group)ParticipantNorth Shore ASBC Lecture Series
The North Shore ASBC Support Group proudly presents:
Joint Attention and Social Stories
by
Hoa Chan, M.A., BCBA
Clinical Director of Tiny Talkers
at
7:00pm, Tues Oct 20
in the Cedar Room of the
West Vancouver Community CentreWe are very pleased to have Hoa Chan as the guest speaker at our upcoming session. She will talk about two topics that are very useful to parents of newly diagnosed children: joint attention and social stories. Hoa is uniquely qualified to discuss the latter, since she has previously conducted an experiment on social stories for her masters thesis.
DATE: Tuesday, Oct 20, 2009
TIME: 7 – 9 pm
LOCATION: Cedar Room, West Van Community Centre (2121 Marine Drive, near 21st Street)Coffee/Tea and snacks provided. Donations are greatly appreciated.
Please RSVP to Carol at colemanmoser@hotmail.com
Carol and Tony
(Co-facilitators for ASBC North Shore Group)ParticipantIf you want to send a more detailed letter to your MLA, I have written a sample by expanding the one from Jenn. You can leave out the last paragraph if youre not keen on having a meeting, but everyone should send a letter to educate their MLA. It only takes a couple of minutes to paste it into an email and fire it off.
Your MLAs email address can be found here:
http://www.leg.bc.ca/mla/3-1-1.htmWe may soon lose everything we have fought so hard for. Trust me – you dont want to go back to where we were seven years ago.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Dear Hon. Lex Luthor,,
I am your constituent, and the parent of an autistic child. I am writing because I am extremely concerned about the announcement from the Ministry of Children and Family Development, on the cancellation of the Direct Funding option for autism treatment.
There was a time when autism funding went to treatment providers operated by the Ministry of Social Services. None of it went to the parents, who helplessly watched the money go to waste. It is hard to imagine anything less effective than having social workers provide healthcare, since they are trained in a completely different field. Despite all the government spending, none of the children received anything even remotely resembling effective treatment.
Parents fought long and hard, and eventually Premier Gordon Campbell listened. In 2003, the Premier brought in the Direct Funding program for autism treatment. Here is a copy of the original CIAT (Choices in Autism Treatment) proposal:
Once the parents had control of the money, the most highly-educated parents taught others to use the funding in the most efficient and effective way possible. As a result, children received science-based treatment from qualified professionals, who were held accountable by the parents. This funding model also saved the government millions of dollars in administrative cost, since the administrative work (such as invoicing) was done by the parents themselves.
During the past six years of direct funding, the non-elected senior management of the MCFD lobbied the government to let them rebuild their autism empire. Unfortunately, they have succeeded in convincing Minister Mary Polak to start taking control away from the parents again. The replacement of the Direct Funding model with the Invoice Payment model may be a small step, but its a step toward a repeat of the nightmare prior to 2003.
Parents are very sure Minister Mary Polak does not realize the financial and human consequences of her decision. We are also very sure Premier Gordon Campbell would never approve, if anyone had actually consulted him. The move backward from financial efficiency to bloated bureaucracy is completely against the Liberal sense of intelligent spending.
I am requesting a meeting with you in person during the coming week. I want to answer any question you may have and I am eager to hear your advice.
Sincerely yours,
Clark KentParticipantRe: former EIBI clients
I believe Louise means the government-run "EIBI" program.
She is not talking about EIBI services in general.
Participant*** REMINDER ***
North Shore ASBC Lecture Series
The North Shore ASBC Support Group proudly presents:
Supporting our children in school:
the law, the IEP, and the advocacy
by
Mike Hancock
and
Harmony House
at
7:00pm, Sept 15
in the North Building of the
Delbrook Recreation Centre in North VancouverWe are very pleased to have the following guest speakers at our upcoming session:
1. Mike Hancock: Mike is a parent of a child with autism, and a former in-house counsel for the Vancouver School Board. He has also previously worked in private practice with a focus on education law. He will review our children's right under the School Act.
2. Bohdanna Popowycz Kvam and Michele Shilvock: Bohdanna and Michele are behavior consultants with extensive experience in the school setting. They will review the art of writing an IEP.
This is a great opportunity for anyone with a school-aged child, or with a child coming up to school age, to learn and ask questions about how to work at integrating your home-based ABA programme into the school system.
DATE: Tuesday, Sept 15, 2009
TIME: 7 – 9 pm
LOCATION: Delbrook Recreation Centre, North Building (600 West Queens Road, North Vancouver)For those going north/west on Highway #1: take exit 17 for Westview Dr, turn right at Westview Dr, and then turn right at Queens Rd. For those going east on Highway #1: take exit 17 for Westview Dr, turn left at Westview Dr, and then turn right at Queens Rd.
Coffee/Tea and snacks provided. Donations are greatly appreciated.
Please RSVP to Carol at colemanmoser@hotmail.com
Carol and Tony
(Co-facilitators for ASBC North Shore Group)Participant*** REMINDER ***
North Shore ASBC Lecture Series
The North Shore ASBC Support Group proudly presents:
Supporting our children in school:
the law, the IEP, and the advocacy
by
Mike Hancock
and
Harmony House
at
7:00pm, Sept 15
in the North Building of the
Delbrook Recreation Centre in North VancouverWe are very pleased to have the following guest speakers at our upcoming session:
1. Mike Hancock: Mike is a parent of a child with autism, and a former in-house counsel for the Vancouver School Board. He has also previously worked in private practice with a focus on education law. He will review our children's right under the School Act.
2. Bohdanna Popowycz Kvam and Michele Shilvock: Bohdanna and Michele are behavior consultants with extensive experience in the school setting. They will review the art of writing an IEP.
This is a great opportunity for anyone with a school-aged child, or with a child coming up to school age, to learn and ask questions about how to work at integrating your home-based ABA programme into the school system.
DATE: Tuesday, Sept 15, 2009
TIME: 7 – 9 pm
LOCATION: Delbrook Recreation Centre, North Building (600 West Queens Road, North Vancouver)For those going north/west on Highway #1: take exit 17 for Westview Dr, turn right at Westview Dr, and then turn right at Queens Rd. For those going east on Highway #1: take exit 17 for Westview Dr, turn left at Westview Dr, and then turn right at Queens Rd.
Coffee/Tea and snacks provided. Donations are greatly appreciated.
Please RSVP to Carol at colemanmoser@hotmail.com
Carol and Tony
(Co-facilitators for ASBC North Shore Group)ParticipantA member of my home team wants to find a second client. She has been trained by Dr. Sara White and has worked for me for more than a year. She is in second year university, with the goal of becoming an SLP.
She is young but very conscientious. During the last winter, she continued coming to work when everyone else gave up trying to travel in the snow.
She lives near Lougheed Mall. This term she is available on Mondays and Wednesdays after school and all day Saturday.
If youre interested, please let her know who your consultant is. Her email address is:
maggie.simpson@live.ca -
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