This was a semi-critical article about parents billing the NYC public school system for $80k+ a year tuition for private schools so that the child "can be functionally remediated" and "indistinguishable from other children."
http://nymag.com/news/features/23172/index.html?imw=Y
Quote:
New York City’s open checkbook for autism is at the heart of the business plan for the Rebecca School, the latest in New York City’s fastest-growing chain of for-profit educational institutions. When it’s fully booked, perhaps two years from now, Rebecca will enroll 200 kids, making it the first megastore in a circuit of tiny boutique schools. The company launching it, Manhattan-based MetSchools, Inc., has spent $7 million to renovate 52,000 square feet of midtown office space (previously home to New York’s biggest abortion clinic).
Quote:
Mayerson doesn’t dare say autistic children can be cured. Rather, he prefers to say they “can be functionally remediated, so a child can be indistinguishable from other children.” That’s the hope Maggie and Robert Eigen hold for their son, Jake, a 7-year-old diagnosed with PDD-NOS who attends the McCarton School. On a recent day, Jake’s $46,000-a-year after-school program went something like this: At 3:15, a half-hour after the official school day ended, a young teacher named Jayshree Patel took Jake to play in the fountains at the Museum of Natural History, and then jumped in a cab with him to head for a trim at Cozy’s Cuts back on the East Side. At 5:30, she handed Jake off to his second teacher, Abi Leibovitch, who also works at McCarton during the day. First they wandered through the lobby of a movie theater on East 86th Street, where they’ve been working on making Jake less scared of big, dark spaces. Then they moved on to Logos Bookstore on York Avenue, where he tried pulling every kids’ book out of the rack, then to the diner on the corner of 86th for some ice cream.
27 Nov 2006, 6:42 pm
