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Star Ledger ‘Gov. Christie faces opposition from N.J. public school advocates in superintendent salary cap measure’
Asbury Park Press Series - Baltimore hospital offers autistic children, families hope …New autism drug tested at New Brunswick hospital …For Cindy Lee Parker, special education has been a school of hard knocks.
Star Ledger ‘Gov. Christie faces opposition from N.J. public school advocates in superintendent salary cap measure’
Published: Monday, November 22, 2010, 7:43 AM Updated: Monday, November 22, 2010, 7:43 AM
Bob Braun/Star-Ledger Columnist
TRENTON — He was the very model of a modern Morris County Republican. He wore a dark suit under a gray Chesterfield overcoat with a black velvet collar. Hair, cropped military style. When he flipped open his cell phone, its backlit screen broadcast the familiar, stylized symbol of the GOP elephant.
Yet Joseph Ricca, the young schools superintendent in East Hanover, had just told Gov. Chris Christie, a rising Republican star, to back off.
"I don’t think any level of government, whether in Washington or Trenton, has the right to dictate what someone can and cannot earn," said Ricca after testifying before a state hearing on the governor’s plan to cap the salaries of school chiefs.
"We do not need government intervention here, no more than we need government intervention to tell us what to eat or what type of health care to buy," said a man with a Harvard doctorate using tea party rhetoric.
"'The government is of the people, for the people, and there is no greater example than that of a locally elected school board with a locally elected annual education budget. The people are the employer in this instance — not the commissioner of education, the Legislature, or the governor."The hearing, where he spoke, at Kean University showed Christie is no longer just fighting with teacher unions and urban schools to cut public spending. He is dealing with an entirely different class of public school advocates — those who fiercely defend the quality of their schools as a way, among other things, of keeping up property values.
"I don’t understand why he is trying to hurt the very people who elected him," said James O’Neill, the Chatham schools superintendent, who then ticked off ways the new administration combined aid cuts with new rules, topped off by the salary caps.
Ricca and O’Neill had lots of support. With one exception — a board member from Parsippany — all the speakers opposed the caps. With one exception — an administrator from Irvington — all the speakers were from wealthy suburbs, red seas in a blue state.
And they were not just superintendents, 70 percent of whom face salary cuts if Christie’s cap goes into effect, as scheduled, in February. Most were elected school board members who pay steep property taxes to attract the best school chiefs money can buy.
Margaret Bennett, a board member from Franklin Lakes, even used the B-word — "bully" — several times to describe Christie’s polices. In what the governor might feel as the unkindest cut of all, Bennett charged him with failing to deal with what she called "the ball and chain dragging down education" — teacher tenure.
"He says he is against tenure but he has not acted against tenure," Bennett said after a hearing that attracted fewer than 100 people. "He is acting against us."
Until now, only teachers and union officials — not allies of people like Bennett — called him a bully. His critics often came from the state’s urban areas — with, of course, the glaring exception of charter school soulmate Cory Booker, Newark’s mayor.
But the fight over superintendents’ pay has opened a third front in the education wars: Now it’s Christie versus the folks with bucks who do not necessarily work as public school employees, who do not live in cities but are strong partisans of public schools.
Some of Christie’s critics were sharp and touched on sacred cows. Here is John Sincaglia, vice president of the Berkeley Heights school board:
"One of the comments made about superintendents’ salaries is that many of them are higher than those of the governor and commissioner. This is a specious observation. Individuals do not become commissioners or governors as part of a career path. It is not their life’s work," said Sincaglia.
"We are paying in excess of $2 million of public funds for our state university’s football coach, but I don’t hear a clamor about lowering that salary."
Christie’s plan would link compensation to school district size, with a maximum of $175,000 for the largest. It would take effect when current contracts expire.
Ricca noted that the present state of local contracts, many with expensive perks, itself grew out of a "reform" of the 1980s — eliminating superintendents’ tenure.
"That was an unintended consequence of tenure reform — we created free agents with high demands. What will be the unintended consequence of this reform?"
The critics raised technical problems — superintendents, for example, who would make less than school principals — but the dominant theme was home rule.
"This is the United States," said James Novotny, a Vernon board member. "Are you going to tell us a locally elected school board can’t make that decision?"
Thursday, November 18th
For Cindy Lee Parker, special education has been a school of hard knocks.
Literal hard knocks.
They are manifest in the gaping holes her autistic son, Jacob, 16, has punched through the doors and drywall in her Tuckerton home and the bruises his fists have left on her body from his frequent aggressive outbursts.
“My lip has been split, my nose has been bloodied, my glasses have been broken,” said Parker, 46. “Yesterday was a prime example. He came out of his bedroom and punched me in the face. I don’t even know why.” Such behavior issues are common among children who are profoundly autistic, experts say. Jacob has had them since birth.
Parker’s complaint is that after stints at four public schools in four different districts, Jacob’s problems seem to be getting worse.
In each case, she said, her son was placed in a fledgling autism program staffed by inexperienced teachers and aides who weren’t required to have any special training in autism. The teachers and schools were under no obligation to show any measurable results for her son.
The lone bright spot, she said, were the five years Jacob spent at the Children’s Center of Monmouth County, a state-approved private school that specializes in autism.The staff there was “working miracles” with Jacob, Parker said. His outbursts diminished, and the family’s home life improved.
Then, more than a year ago, the Pinelands Regional School District pulled Jacob out of the school over his parents’ objections, after the New Jersey Department of Education enacted new “fiscal accountability” rules. Those rules were aimed at getting districts to curtail costly placements to private special-education schools.
But transferring Jacob doesn’t appear to be a costsaver.
In fact, his tuition costs, paid for by the Pinelands district, have increased by 50 percent. While the Children’s Center charges $56,000 per student, Jacob’s new school, Southern Regional High School in Stafford, charges $85,000.
The results so far, his mother said, have been deeply discouraging.
“Jacob is doing horribly, absolutely horribly,” Parker said on the eve of what she fears will be another tumultuous school year. “We had to call 911 to save him from beating the living tar out of me. . . . This is like the fourth time.” Parker is one of many parents of disabled children who have lost faith in a special-education system they say is intractable, capricious and unaccountable.
“There’s no accountability for whether the program is a success or not,” she said, echoing the findings of a presidential commission on special education in 2002.
The commission described a system “driven by process, litigation, regulation and confrontation” — not student achievement.
Parker has experienced all of that in the past 13 years, and then some.
“Unless you have the money and the persistence and the knowledge and the know-how to document everything, you never win,” she said. “I’m fighting a system that is so broken, I can’t make it right.”
A classic ‘mismatch’
One day, while Parker tried to relate her family’s experiences to a reporter, Jacob, who is 5-foot-9 and 246 pounds, stood inches from her face, insisting that his mother go buy him a new memory card for his digital camera.
“Broken, fix it, broken, fix it, broken, fix it, broken, fix it,” he repeated.
“I can’t fix it. You need a new memory card,” Parker told her son.
With that, he flung his left arm and struck the side of his own head with a walloping smack.
The daily challenges of raising a severely autistic child are enormous, especially for mothers, who tend to be around their children the most.
One recent study found that mothers of adolescents and adults with autism experience chronic stress comparable with combat soldiers.
Transfer those same challenges to a public school setting, and the problems can sometimes get worse.
“If you look at autism as a severe neurological disorder that’s essentially being treated in an educational system, it’s a little bit of a mismatch,” said Suzanne Buchanan, clinical director of Autism New Jersey, a statewide advocacy group.
“We’re expecting a lot of our teachers, and even our special-ed teachers,” she said. “Frankly, while some certainly have a wonderful skill set and are very effective, a great number of teachers are ineffective, or minimally effective, with students with autism.” Michele Goodman, executive director of New Horizons in Autism, a Neptunebased agency that operates seven group homes and two vocational programs for autistic adults in Monmouth and Ocean counties, said many autistic students still aren’t toilettrained when they leave school.
“There are too many adults coming in here in Depends,” Goodman said. “The system is broken, and the only people who are able to negotiate through it are the squeaky wheels.”
The rules change
To be sure, Jacob is not your average special-education student.
The vast majority of New Jersey’s 200,000 school-age special-education students have relatively minor speech and reading problems, not incapacitating brain disorders like Jacob’s.
Fewer than 12,000 — less than 6 percent of all special-education students — are classified with autism. And many of those are on the higher functioning end of the autism spectrum. With a little extra help, they can do as well in school as other students.
But the same rules, spelled out in federal and state laws, apply to all special-education students, regardless of what kind of disability they have.
In 2008, the rules changed.
Under the state’s new “fiscal accountability” procedures, district childstudy teams, which craft each special-education student’s Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, were required to consult with their county executive school superintendent prior to placing a disabled student in a private school. The county superintendent, an employee of the state Education Department, is supposed to help identify other school districts in the area that could accommodate the child’s needs.
While the final decision about where to place the child is supposed to be left to the child-study teams in consultation with the child’s parents, that’s not how everyone interpreted the new rules at first.
In the spring of 2009, the Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Public Schools held public hearings in response to complaints that children were being denied privateschool placements or pulled out of private schools they had attended for years, on account of the new rules.
Parker was among the parents who testified at the hearings. She recounted how Jacob’s case worker from Pinelands Regional abruptly informed her that he couldn’t attend the Children’s Center any longer.
“I was just flabbergasted,” Parker testified. “She brought no paperwork with her. She brought no reports with her. There was nothing. It was, ‘Sign this release to send your son to the closest public school district because the state will provide us with no aid concerning his education if you don’t.’ ” Messages left for Pinelands Regional’s interim superintendent, Daniel Loggi, were not returned.
At the behest of irate legislators, then-state Education Commissioner Lucille E. Davy issued a memo in May 2009 clarifying the rules, but by then it was too late for Jacob.
Parker and her husband, John Caldwell, 51, tried to fight the district to keep Jacob where he was, tapping into their retirement savings to hire an attorney. But when their legal bills hit $9,000, and Jacob’s favorite teacher at the Children’s Center moved to Hawaii, they reluctantly agreed to the transfer.
A revenue generator
It is frustrating for Parker to see Jacob in yet another unproven autism program.
“I want to know, what success rate do they have? Show me the data that’s saying that ‘Joey is now in a group home because of all the wonderful things that Southern Regional has done for him,’ ” she said. “I have no idea.” The district’s superintendent, Craig Henry, wouldn’t address Parker’s case, citing student confidentiality rules.
But Henry noted that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the chief federal law regulating the nation’s special-education system, doesn’t require districts to collect that kind of aggregate data. “There aren’t any quantified benchmarks for students,” he said. “There’s no standardized way to measure the success of a program.” The only available gauge is parental feedback, which Henry said has been overwhelmingly positive since the district started an autism program in an unused wing of the junior high school three years ago.
“I would say without hesitation the quality is as good as it gets,” he said. “Our parents are extremely satisfied.” Henry cited the involvement of several local businesses that are providing vocational training opportunities for students and the “extensive” experience of Jacob’s teacher.
Asked what that experience was, Henry said the teacher took classes in autism in college and spent a year teaching autistic students in another district.
“I didn’t mean it in terms of experience in years,” Henry said.
Instead, he said, he was referring to the teacher’s extensive “interest and time spent studying” autism. The teacher has even started a nonprofit foundation, Piece of the Puzzle Inc., dedicated to providing job training and employment opportunities to adolescents and young adults with autism.
Parker said the teacher is “wonderful,” but the school’s program simply “isn’t behavioral enough” to address Jacob’s severe aggression problems.
“He has no carry-over, no generalization,” she said. “What they teach him there doesn’t carry over here, and what I teach him here doesn’t carry over there. They can take him to the park (with at least two male staff members as escorts), but I can’t.” Parker wasn’t aware that her district is paying $85,000 in tuition to send Jacob to Southern Regional.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “For $85,000 my kid should be tap dancing in Radio City Music Hall. . . . I’m blown away.” Jacob is one of six out-ofdistrict students in Southern Regional’s program. Their combined tuition costs account for more than $500,000 in annual revenue for the school.
Henry said the state Education Department sets the tuition rates, based on certain eligible expenses.
Southern Regional appears to have the highest tuition rate among the several dozen districts whose autism program tuition rates are listed on the state’s Real Time database, which is still being developed for county superintendents to access.
Two Union County districts, New Providence and Warren, had the secondhighest rate listed, $76,220 per student.
Many districts charge less than half that amount. Central Regional, in Ocean County, charges just over $25,000 per out-of-district student for its high school autism program.
Gerard M. Thiers, executive director of ASAH, a nonprofit group that represents the interests of 135 private schools for the disabled, said such rates can be misleading.
While the tuition rates at private schools are based on actual expenses, the rates for public schools don’t take such things as employee health benefits, pensions and overhead costs into account.
ASAH’s own study shows that private schools cost less than public schools, he said.
“What appears to be a cheaper rate at a public program, most often it’s not cheaper for the taxpayers,” he said.
Time running out
Jacob still has another five years before he turns 21 and has to leave the public school system. His mother is worried what kind of life he’ll have if he doesn’t turn the corner by then.
“My goal is to get him to be part of the world,” Parker said. “That’s every parent’s goal, whether their kid is a regular-education kid or a special-education kid. We want them to be the best they can be.” Two years ago, Parker and her husband tried to get Jacob into Kennedy Krieger Institute, a pediatric hospital in Baltimore, whose 16-bed neurobehavioral inpatient unit treats autistic and intellectually disabled children as young as 5 with especially severe behavior problems.
Parker said the highly selective institute accepted Jacob “within 26 minutes” of observing his behavior, but she and her husband ran into health insurance roadblocks and weren’t able to get him admitted.
Parker said there isn’t an inpatient treatment program anywhere in New Jersey that comes close to what Kennedy Krieger offers.
“That is where Jacob needs to be,” Parker said.
Parker tried to get Medicaid to cover the hospitalization but was told the family’s income was too high.
Now, she and her husband, who have two other children besides Jacob, have reached such a low point that they’re considering getting divorced, simply so Parker could qualify for Medicaid and get Jacob into Kennedy Krieger.
“If that’s what it comes down to,” Parker said, “that’s what we’re going to do.”
Shannon Mullen: 732-643-4278; smullen4@app.com
Baltimore hospital offers autistic children, families hope
By SHANNON MULLEN STAFF WRITER
Alex DeLuca’s parents have something now they sorely lacked through the first 12 years of their son’s life.
Hope.
Like many children with autism, Alex, now 13, of Beachwood, has had serious behavior problems throughout his life.
Some of these children wind up having to be institutionalized for the rest of their lives. That was the trajectory Alex was on.
He used to bang his head so hard against the wall that there are still gaping holes hiding behind a poster of a tiger in the family’s living room. He left bite marks on his mother’s ankles and scalp, and purple bruises on her upper arms, just beyond the protective pads she had to wear on her arms, because he would pinch her arms when he got upset.
After several failed years in the Toms River public schools, he was placed at the Children’s Center of Monmouth County, a private autism school in Neptune, but his behavior problems persisted.
In desperation, his parents, Alex DeLuca Jr. and Annie Mennicucci, turned to the Kennedy Krieger Institute, a pediatric hospital in Baltimore.
Its 16-bed, inpatient neurobehavioral unit is internationally known for helping children as young as 5 with autism and other intellectual disabilities and with profound behavior problems that schools and other therapists can’t manage.
Most children admitted to the unit remain there for three to six months. Alex was there for seven months.
To get into the unit, parents must have exhausted local treatment resources and must agree to participate in intensive training sessions themselves.
‘‘The intervention involves teaching a whole new set of skills,’’ said Dr. Louis P. Hagopian, a psychologist and research scientist at Kennedy Krieger. ‘‘Part of it is teaching the child, but the other part is teaching the parent what to do.’’ The institute’s approach is based on the principles of applied behavior analysis, or ABA, which is the science of human behavior. The parental training is ‘‘performance-based,’’ meaning parents have to master the techniques, with 90 percent accuracy, before they can bring their children home.
Mennicucci, Alex’s mother, made the 300-mile round-trip to Baltimore nearly every day during his last three months in the unit.
‘‘She was fantastic,’’ Hagopian said.
‘‘They don’t fix him there,’’ said Bobbie Gallagher of Brick, a behavior consultant for New Horizons in Autism, a Neptunebased agency, who is overseeing the home therapy Alex receives almost every day. Gallagher’s son Austin, 18, spent 4 months at Kennedy Krieger.
‘‘It’s not like he had a tumor removed, and now he’s all better,’’ she said. ‘‘They give you a plan to work on.’’ Alex’s plan divides his entire day, at home and at school, into alternating blocks of time, during which he is either expected to follow instructions or allowed to do something he enjoys, such as listening to his MP3 player or watching videos.
Because of Alex’s language limitations, his parents, teachers and therapists wear color-coded laminated cards around their necks to indicate which set of rules are in effect: green for ‘‘Alex’s way,’’ red for ‘‘our way.’’ The ABA approach also uses tangible rewards to keep children motivated. Alex’s include MP3 time, Gummi bears and chocolate-covered pretzels.
His mother has to record virtually everything he does during the day in a binder that Gallagher and his therapists use to spot problems and track his progress.
‘‘It’s difficult, still, because this is what I have to do every day of my life, but I definitely have more control over him,’’ said Mennicucci, 34, who no longer has to pad herself like a football player when she is around her son.
While Kennedy Krieger has been a godsend for many families, the costs associated with long-term inpatient treatment there can be prohibitive.
Mennicucci said Alex’s bill totaled more than $500,000. Because he qualified for Medicaid coverage — Alex’s father, Alex DeLuca Jr., 48, is a baker, while Mennicucci is a stayat-home mom — the family paid nothing.
‘‘They helped him tremendously,’’ Mennicucci said. ‘‘I just wish I went sooner.’’
Friday, November 19th
SPECIAL CARE UNKNOWN COSTS
Asbury Park Press ‘Innovation leading way in special ed’ (Thurs Nov. 18 & Fri. Nov 19 2010)
Vouchers, training gain states’ favor…Last in a six-part series
By SHANNON MULLEN
In California, 25,000 veteran specialeducation teachers are being sent back to school this year to learn the nuances of teaching students with autism.
In Florida, Georgia and Utah, parents who are unhappy with their local public school’s special-education program can use taxpayer-funded vouchers to send their disabled child to another public or private school they think can do a better job.
In Kansas, researchers are developing sophisticated “learning maps” to give educators a more holistic view of what special-education students are actually learning.
And here in New Jersey, where fiscal constraints are forcing districts to curtail the number of disabled students placed in specialized private schools, the Marlboro School District and the Search Day Program, a private autism school in Ocean Township, have partnered in a cost-saving joint venture.
To save taxpayers money, Search is staffing a preschool and kindergarten class at the district’s early education center, enabling a half-dozen autistic students who need specialized instruction to remain in the district.
The district still pays the students’ tuition, but it saves on transportation costs, and its teachers benefit from in-service workshops run by Search staff.
“In essence, they’re using our space but it’s 100 percent their program,” said Robert Klein, the district’s director of special services. “It’s really working out well.” Such innovations can’t happen soon enough for parents who feel their children have slipped through the cracks of a costly and contentious special-education system that critics say is broken and in need of major reform.
Under federal law, every child with a disability is entitled to a “free and appropriate” education. Yet little data exists to gauge the quality of that education, which costs an estimated $3.3 billion per year in New Jersey. Unless parents are willing to take legal action, which can be prohibitively expensive, many districts will provide only the most basic services, some parents and advocates say.
“They just do the bare minimum, just enough to say they’re not in violation,” said one Ocean County parent, who is frustrated that her 17-year-old son, who is autistic, still hasn’t learned to safely cross the street.
“If you call that a free and appropriate education, I guess that’s what they’re providing,” she said. “But for me, appropriate is what’s best for the child, to be a functional member of society.” The parent requested anonymity because she was afraid her comments could jeopardize her son’s services.
‘Combatants into consumers’
Perhaps the greatest challenge to the status quo is coming from the specialeducation voucher programs that a small but growing number of states have adopted in recent years.
The oldest of these programs is Florida’s John M. McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities, named for a state legislator whose daughter struggled with learning disabilities.
Created in 2001, the program provided vouchers to nearly 21,000 students in 2009-10. The total outlay that year was $138.7 million.
The amount of the scholarship is equal to either the amount that would have been earmarked for the student’s education had they remained in their local public school, or the cost of tuition and fees at the private school they wish to attend, whichever is less.
Similar programs have been established in Utah, Georgia and Oklahoma. Louisiana started a twoyear pilot program this year. Ohio has a scholarship specifically for students with autism.
Maurice Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a nonprofit think tank in New York City, said one of the advantages of these programs is that it spares parents and school districts the time and expense of adjudicating special-education disputes.
“It’s a market accountability and choice system,” Winters said. “Instead of getting a court to decide what services to provide for a kid, this system lets parents decide what’s the best place for their child. It solves a lot of problems for special ed.” A report by the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., said such voucher programs can transform parents from “combatants into consumers.” Critics of these programs, however, accuse school-choice advocates of using the plight of some special-education families as a wedge to further their pro-voucher agenda. In addition, some parents and disability-rights groups are wary of vouchers because they fear they could undermine the hard-earned legal protections that the current system provides.
Arizona’s special-education voucher program was struck down last year after it was challenged by the state’s teachers union and civil liberties groups, on the grounds that it violated a state constitutional provision barring public funds from flowing to religious institutions.
Meeting the autism challenge
The dramatic surge in autism cases nationwide has placed enormous strain on the special-education system.
In some states, educators and policymakers are beginning to recognize that the unique demands of an autistic child can be overwhelming for even the most experienced specialeducation teachers.
In California, under a new state requirement, some 25,000 special-education teachers must complete an autism training course by July 2011 in order to work with children who have the disorder. The mandate only applies to those teachers licensed to educate students with moderate to severe disabilities.
Catherine Kearney, president of the California Teacher Corps, a nonprofit group that is coordinating the training programs, said teachers on the whole have welcomed the new rule.
“Many of the teachers, if not most, have looked at their students and said, ‘I need to learn more about autism,’ ” she said.
There is no such training requirement in New Jersey, though some districts voluntarily provide autism training, and many teachers seek it out on their own.
Yet experts say even well-trained teachers ought to be supervised by someone steeped in whatever research-based methodology the school is using in its autism program.
The most widely used approach is called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, which is the science of evaluating and controlling human behavior.
In Connecticut, a law passed earlier this year requires school districts that provide autistic students with ABA services to ensure that the staff members or consultants who do so are certified by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board, a nonprofit accrediting organization.
To be certified, candidates are required to have a master’s degree in behavior analysis or a related field, complete up to 18 months of supervised work and pass an exam.
The measure stemmed from parental complaints about a paid school consultant who falsely claimed to be a certified behavior analyst. In most states, including New Jersey, “anybody can hang a shingle and say they’re an autism expert,” said Suzanne Letso, a board-certified behavior analyst who runs a private autism school in Milford, Conn.
No child left behind?
Barbara Gantwerk, head of the New Jersey Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, said special education is already in the midst of a major reform: the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
That law, passed in 2001, requires that all U.S. students — including those with disabilities — be proficient in their state’s core academic areas by the 2013-14 school year.
“Years ago, you would go into a school and (the special-education students) would be focused on life skills,” she said. “The expectations have greatly been raised, the barriers have broken down. I think there have been significant changes.” While educators say a wide academic achievement gap between special-education and regular-education students appears to be narrowing, it’s not happening fast enough to meet the now-looming federal deadline.
“Part of the issue is, we need more time, I hate to say it,” said Alexa Posny, assistant U.S. secretary for special education and rehabilitative services.
However, some parents of children with serious cognitive disorders such as autism, Down syndrome or cerebral palsy — who constitute fewer than 20 percent of all special-education students in the U.S. — say the federal law, and the focus on standardized test scores it has engendered, have little relevance to their children’s needs.
For example, the same autistic Ocean County teen who can’t yet safely cross the street on his own — or hold a conversation, for that matter — is supposed to be able to explain “how British North American colonies adapted the British governance structure to fit their ideas of individual rights, economic growth, and participatory government,” among other New Jersey core curriculum requirements for high school seniors.
“It’s a little ridiculous,” said his mother.
Better data needed
Neal Kingston, director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas, believes there’s a better way to evaluate what special-education students know, and don’t know.
In October, the U.S. Department of Education awarded his center a $22 million grant — the largest in the university’s history — to develop a new assessment tool, called the Dynamic Learning Maps Alternate Assessment System.
Kingston describes a learning map as an “electronic portfolio” that breaks down a set of core curriculum standards to “an almost atomistic level.” The result is a collection of “thousands” of different tasks or skills that the student will have to acquire in order to eventually meet those standards.
The hope is that this tool will help teachers more precisely identify which skills the student needs help with, Kingston said.
“So when a student needs remediation, we can be as diagnostic and prescriptive as a physician can be,” he said.
Eleven states, including New Jersey, have agreed to implement the new system, on a pilot basis, in the 2014-15 school year. Kingston believes these maps can help parents keep closer tabs on their child’s progress in school.
Meanwhile, Brenda Considine, coordinator of the New Jersey Coalition for Special Education Funding Reform, which represents the interests of several disability rights groups as well as private special-education schools, says her organization will continue to urge the state Education Department to do a comprehensive cost analysis of the system, something the group has sought for the past 14 years.
“Nothing in New Jersey has ever looked at the full costs — nothing,” she said. “Yet we’re making a policy decision that says, ‘Bring kids back into the district because it’s cheaper.’ There’s just no data.” Nor has a study been done that looks at longterm student outcomes, she noted.
“Our coalition has never said it’s about more money; it’s about smarter money. It’s knowing where things make a difference in the system for kids,” Considine said. “Without good data, there’s not a lot of solutions that make sense.”
Shannon Mullen: 732-643-4278; shannon@app.com
New autism drug tested at New Brunswick hospital
By TOM BALDWIN
NEW BRUNSWICK — Final testing of a new treatment for autism is taking place at Saint Peter’s University Hospital.
“We are targeting the symptoms of autism,” said Dr. Joan Fallon, founder of Curemark LLC, a drug-research and development company located in Rye, N.Y. The company is testing its new product at 13 locations nationwide.
The testing being conducted at Saint Peter’s involves 170 youngsters, hospital spokesman Phil Hartman said.
Fallon said the test pool covers children age 3 to 8. She said she expects results “sometime early next year.” For competitive reasons, she did not want to discuss specifics of the product, called for now “CM-AT,” for “Curemark’s autism treatment.” She said the testing started about three months ago. Dr. Barbie Zimmerman-Bier of Saint Peter’s, who is running the study, said: “Subjects heard about it and they got word from support groups. ... There was a screening process to see if they were eligible. They had to be between 3 and 8.” Regarding how children are being tested to see if the drug works and how frequently they are being checked, Fallon said, “We use standardized, validated measures to look at change in their behaviors.” Zimmerman-Bier said children were seen at the beginning of the study, then at two weeks, four weeks, eight weeks and 12 weeks.
Curemark said in a prepared statement: “CM-AT, which has received fasttrack status from the FDA, is based on Curemark’s research that showed enzyme deficiencies in autistic children, resulting in an inability to digest protein. The inability to digest protein affects the availability of amino acids, the building blocks of chemicals essential for brain function.
The statement concluded, “If approved, CM-AT will be one of the first therapies to address the underlying physiology of autism.” Fallon said Saint Peter’s was chosen because “they are a well-known center for autism,” citing the work of Zimmerman-Bier, head of the developmental and behavioral pediatrics program at Saint Peter’s Healthcare System.
“We do see a lot of children,” Zimmerman-Bier said. “We don’t know what the children are getting. It is a double-blind study.” “We have one of the most advanced testing methodologies in schools and in hospitals,” Hartman said. “People actually relocate here to take advantage of the services available in New Jersey.” Tom Baldwin writes for the Home News Tribune.
732-565-7270; tbaldwin@MyCentralJersey.com
