Having spent eight years at Nevada’s Clark County School Distract, Charlene Green has seen the number who have autism spectrum disorders that she has being in charge of increase from 96 to over 1000 children. Charlene Green, who is the associate superintendent for student support in the Las Vegas-area district, has a responsibility for those children’s education and oversees how they are doing. It is an expensive and complex task that she has to do. She said that five years ago, the school system was at an all-time low when dealing with the special needs of its autistic children and the parents too.
She also said that they were bombarded with due process requests by parents of autistic children who wanted a legal option against the school system, as they thought it wasn’t providing the necessary education for their child. They believed that as the rules state in the 1990 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that the schools should provide proper education for their children. At the time, Charlene Green believed they were doing what was best for the children at that particular time. She went on to say she learned that the parents were far more advanced than they used to be about what was good for a child with autism and what was not so good.
Green has a lot of experience dealing with children with autism and her knowledge of this is similar to that of parents and school districts across the country. In the past decade, the rate of diagnosed cases of autism spectrum disorders has almost doubled. This is in part to the increase of public understanding and acknowledgment of the disorder. There are effective autism treatment programs that can be taken, most of these are therapy based and is called Applied Behavioral Analysis or ABA. It often takes a 40 hours per week of one-on-one instructions and this can sometimes cost tens of thousands of dollars for each child with autism per year.