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2 Winter Wonderland
4 Timeline of Life
5 Cooking with Children
6 Community Outreach
8 Holiday Presentations
10 Special Guests
Upcoming
events
March
20-Mar Brambleton Walk/Run 5K
26 & 27 Art Day
Cascades Campus
27-Mar Earth Day
29-Mar to 2-Apr Spring Break
Aldie, Broadlands, Fairfax, Reston and Westfields
No Classes
April
9-Apr Progress Update
Week of 12-Apr AMS/SACS Re-accreditation
16-Apr Art Auction
Westfields Campus
23-Apr Middle School Rock Concert
25-Apr Earth Day at Loudoun
May
1-May International Festival
14-May Walk for Water
28-May Trike-a-Thon for St. Jude's
Fairfax Campus
31-May Memorial Day
All Campus - No Classes |
If you ask my daughter, Isabel, what autism means to her, she won’t say that it is a condition marked by impaired social communication and repetitive behaviors. She will say that her autism makes her a good artist, helps her to relate to animals and gives her perfect pitch.
The stigma of autism is fading fast. One reason is that we now understand that autism is a spectrum with an enormous range. Some people with autism are nonverbal with profound cognitive disabilities, while others are accomplished professionals.
Many people with milder symptoms of autism have, for the past 20 years or so, received a diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder. Some autistic adults call themselves “Aspies” to celebrate their talents and differences. And many parents have embraced the label because they have found it less stigmatizing, and so it has eased their sense of loss.
This may soon change, however. The American Psychiatric Association, with its release this week of proposed revisions to its authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is recommending that Asperger’s be dropped. If this revision
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is adopted, the condition will be folded into the category of “autism spectrum disorder,” which will no longer contain any categories for distinct subtypes of autism like Asperger’s and “pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified” (a category for children with some traits of autism but not enough to warrant a diagnosis).
The change is welcome, because careful study of people with Asperger’s has demonstrated that the diagnosis is misleading and invalid, and there are clear benefits to understanding autism as one condition that runs along a spectrum.
When the American Psychiatric Association first recognized Asperger’s disorder in 1994, it was thought to be a subtype of autism. As the diagnosis became more common, it broadened the public understanding of autism as a spectrum. It helped previously undiagnosed adults to understand their years of feeling unconnected to others, but without bestowing what was considered the stigma of autism. And it helped educators justify providing services for children who, in the past, might have been unappreciated or even bullied because of their differenece,
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