Today, Sarah Palin spoke about her plans for special-needs kids. While I understand that autistic children are not the only segment being addressed here, since the autistic dog-whistle has been used by the campaign, and because that is the area with which I am most familiar under that umbrella, that is how I will address her remarks.
First and foremost, let me state that though I feel that the needs of special-needs children are being used as a sort of false political bait in this instance, I do believe that opening up the conversation is extremely important. With the massive rise in children with special needs - and I am not intending to and will not debate why that rise is occurring - it is more important now than ever to address those needs comprehensively and on a national level. The rise in children diagnosed with autism alone is so significant that it could very well become a national economics issue within the next ten to twenty years. These children will be entering the workforce and attempting to build adult lives. If a viable plan for assisting these children now to become the sort of adults who will be able to function in the sort of global community (toward which we are inexorably headed) is not in place soon, we will face a much more expensive and much greater burden later on.
I am thrilled that this is a part of our national dialogue now. However, it is not presently being appropriately or helpfully addressed, especially as it pertains to autism/spectrum disorders.
For those of you who are not familiar with autism and its various therapies, one of the most frequently used and most successful therapies is behavioral therapy. Critics say that BT is an attempt to train the autism out of a child, and I can agree that poorly applied, this may be the case. If properly applied, properly used, and appropriately scaled to the individual child, BT can in many cases be better termed coping strategies or even learning the language of the alien territory. I have spoken previously and continue to speak of teaching my son to get along in the world as very similar to teaching someone who was raised on another continent and in another culture the unspoken rules of our society, and its language.
Most kids just innately get that when you tell them "It'll be done when it's done," what you mean is "I don't know when it'll be over." What Scout hears when you say that is "I just don't want to tell you." It upsets him. Most kids don't start crying when another Cub Scout who's helping them set up chairs for a pack meeting starts to rearrange the chairs into more spread-out lines. It doesn't threaten their sense of how the world is put together.
This is Scout's world, the country he comes from, and there are more and more children every day coming from their own countries with their own unique languages and sets of customs. If we do not have a comprehensive system in place to assist these children with learning the customs and cultures (to say nothing of self-care and other skills), we will have a work force that resembles nothing so much as a tower of Babel.
What Palin has proposed, however, is simply another thinly-veiled attempt to push school vouchers down the throats of the U.S. populace, and once again the McCain campaign has attempted to wrap this proposal in something that we as parents of special-needs children are expected to be unable to deny. Not only that, they wrap that all up in a tax scare that blatantly and falsely paints McCain's tax plan as being far superior to Obama's for families whose children have special needs.
Priceless:
Under the plan, federal money would be used to help parents send their children to a public, private or religious school of their choice, according to the campaign.
So the big cornerstone to their plan is... school vouchers. I read that and almost laughed. "School vouchers? That's it? Where are the plans for early intervention, the assistance for parents whose families need more intensive intervention in school years, the plans to make autism coverage mandatory in private health insurance, coverage for therapy/assistance for autistic kids receiving SCHIP?"
There is a lot of controversy in the autism/autism supporters communities over whether early intervention is critical. I would be foolish not to acknowledge that. I can only go by what I believe and my own experiences with Scout: if we are to view this as teaching our children to speak the language of the foreign country in which they find themselves, we would be foolish to ignore the mountains of evidence which shows that children learn a language most easily in the period before their formal schooling traditionally begins in this country.
Palin's "plan" does not address this at all. It addresses only the ability of parents to send their children to the school of their choice, presumably while not directing additional resources to already-strapped, already-stretched public schools, many of which already push back against formally recognizing autism. Talk to one parent who's had to fight for an IEP and you will understand how very difficult it can be to get a public school system to cooperate if they're underfunded or have their resources stretched.
To add insult to insult, however, Palin took it one step further:
Palin also criticized Obama's tax plan.
"Understandably then many families with special-needs children or dependent adults, they're concerned about ... our opponent in this election, who plans to raise taxes on precisely these kinds of financial arrangements," she said.
"They fear that Sen. Obama's tax increase will have serious and harmful consequences, and they're right, because the burden that his plan would pose upon these families is just one more example of how many plans can be disrupted and how many futures can be placed at risk and how many people can suffer when the power to tax is misused."
Really? I should fear a tax plan that won't raise my taxes because I make less than 250K a year over a tax plan that would tax my health care premiums and give me a 5K tax credit? I should fear someone who wants to meaningfully reform health care over someone who would leave a family with one kid who needs Behavioral Therapy swimming in bills for therapy that run at a thousand dollars a week because their insurance won't cover it?
And the worst part is, the more we hear about Palin's family and her thirteen-year-old autistic nephew, the less excusable it becomes. My heart goes out to Palin's sister and her child, but it makes my fury with the transparent political gambit being played here all the greater. At first I was disgusted because McCain stated that she knew what we were going through. Now I understand her family's personal situation, and her closeness with her own sister through their struggles, and now all I can think is:
You should know better.