Children with autism need help now and PEI report called Inaction Strategy

Ronnie Nicholson image: CBC

By Ronnie Nicholson

I feel the need to speak out on the recent release of the PEI Autism Action Plan. I attended the release and my indignant reaction to the Plan received some media attention in both the Guardian and CBC News.

It was not my intention to rain on Minister Currie’s parade at the media launch last Tuesday. My intention was to watch an historic moment unfold where autistic children on PEI would be given the much needed supports they need, but was soon let down by what proved to be a dismal response to a critical moment for these children.

I believe that Minister Currie is a good man and quite competent at the helm of the Education portfolio. I could not help but feel empathy for Mr. Currie as I grilled him on his Department’s meager resources allocated to early intervention in the Action Plan.

I am acutely aware of the fiscal restraints that the Department is under, however as I will point out below, these children if left without the proper comprehensive early intervention will require an ongoing blank cheque from the provincial coffers for their entire lives.

The point I was trying to make was lost in the media coverage of my own particular situation. I wanted to articulate that my own four year old son is being released from the grip of Autism because we are fortunate enough to have the resources to get help for our son. I wanted to advocate for those parents who do not have the resources to help their children have the same positive outcome that we are experiencing.

What the public needs to understand is that there are particular treatments, speech language pathology, occupational therapy, and intensive behavioral intervention (IBI) that will help these children immensely to learn to interface and cope with the confusing world around them. These children are locked in their own world of horrors before treatment, and with these treatments they can learn to make sense of and actively engage with their environment. From my perspective it is immoral and inhumane to not comprehensively treat these children as the vast majority suffer from clinical levels of stress, as do their families.

In my earlier reference to these children requiring a blank cheque for the rest of their days, I argue that time is of the essence. If we amortize the resources needed to care for an improperly treated child for life, including an Educational Assistant for the duration of their education, publicly funded supervised housing, and income supports, those costs would be exponentially greater than the funds spent on a brief period of intensive pre-school early intervention. The earlier and more comprehensive the intervention the better the chance of the child recovering and some day living independently as a contributing member of society.

Currently, all the province is offering is $11.00 per hour for a family to find a IBI tutor and have them travel to their homes or child care centre for 20 hours per week. Quite often a family has no additional resources beyond those required for their own basic living needs thus the turn over rate is immense and is often a challenge to keep a tutor. Let’s not even get into the abysmal level of available publicly funded speech language pathologists and occupational therapists, as it is often a number of weeks between visits from these specialists given the shortage.

This government has failed to look out for what may be the most vulnerable members of our society and has done nothing more than shuffle papers for the last two years while creating this so-called strategy. It is imperative that these children receive the help that they deserve NOW to address the severe deficiencies in the current system.

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