Daily Gleaner (Fredericton NB)
Published Wednesday May 23rd, 2007
Appeared on page C7
Keep autistic children in the province
This is a letter to Premier Shawn Graham.
I am a father of a 13-year-old autistic boy. We had to fight for services for our son from the day he was born: to get diagnosed, to get Applied Behavioural Analysis therapy (before it was mandatory), to get teacher's aides in the classroom, to keep him in school, and to get hospital treatment when his compulsion to bite and pinch got to the point where he was covered in wounds and bruises.
I am afraid my wife and I do not have much fight left in us these days. Our son has lived under constant supervision 24 hours a day for the last year. Two workers stay in our home with him during the day (two are needed to restrain him during his rages). While we commend them for all they have done, the workers are merely a Band-Aid solution.
Our only option at this point is to send our son out of country to the U.S. for treatment that he desperately needs.
Services at the two facilities, in Maine or Boston, will cost the government $200,000 to $300,000 a year. Right now my son is costing the government $15,000 to $20,000 a month because of the government's lack of direction when it comes to older autistic children.
My question to you, Mr. Graham, is that it may have been cost effective at one time to send these children away (out of sight, out of mind). But now with it being 1 in 150 children being diagnosed within the autism spectrum disorder, maybe we should re-evaluate the direction our province is going in.
I realize that there may be no other recourse for my son but to be sent to these facilities in the U.S. for treatment.
I hope in the future we may be able to prevent our children from having to leave Canada to get the services they so desperately need.
Stephen Robbins
Woodstock, N.B.
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