Autism in Obama’s stimulus plan
by Beth
Wondering how the proposed stimulus plan might affect your child with autism? An article in last week’s New York Times called Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education says that some of the money would go towards special education for children with autism and other disabilities. The story reported that President Obama’s Stimulus Plan allocates $150 billion to new federal spending on education, with $17 billion of that going specifically towards special education.
The bill would increase 2009 fiscal year spending on Title I, a program of specialized classroom efforts to help educate poor children, to $20 billion from about $14.5 billion, and raise spending on education for disabled children to $17 billion from $11 billion.
Those increases respond to longtime demands by teachers unions, school boards and others that Washington fully finance the mandates laid out for states and districts in the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, and in the main federal law regulating special education.
An AP story called Education chief: Schools crucial to recovery quotes Education Secretary Arne Duncan saying that in order to recover and succeed, we need to invest several billion dollars in education.
Money for education makes up about one-sixth of the $819 billion stimulus measure approved by the House.
The measure would pump an extra $26 billion into two long-term programs — No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, an increase that critics say will be impossible to roll back when the economy improves.
Duncan said the money would be “righting a huge, historic wrong,” because Congress has never spent what it promised for the programs.
“There is going to be this huge outpouring of joy because this has been a desperately unfunded mandate for far too long,” he said.
February 14th, 2009 at 1:12 am
How about less discrimination by human resource managers against autistic people?
February 9th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
The last I saw Title 1 and IDEA were areas the Senate was trying to reduce…don’t know where it stands right now.