BAC Rutland

Parents and caregivers are invited to a conference on Asperger’s syndrome presented by the Center for Disability Services.  The eighth annual conference will be held April 9 at the Italian American Community Center, 257 Washington Avenue Extended in Albany.
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Kevin and Jill Larkin knew early on that something was not quite right with their son. At 2, Ryan had an odd habit of flapping his hands, wouldn’t respond when they spoke to him and was transfixed by the television set, staring at it long after they turned it off.

Still, “when the doctor sat me down and said, ‘It’s not good news,’ I remember thinking, ‘Where’s he going to go to college?’ ” Kevin Larkin said. “They looked at me and said, ‘Your son won’t read.’ ”
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Margaret Oliver, a 47-year-old hairdresser in Venice, Calif., received a lifesaving kidney transplant in 2002. The government covered the costs under a special Medicare program for the hundreds of thousands of Americans with kidney failure who need either dialysis or a transplant.

Three years later, Medicare stopped paying for the expensive immunosuppressive drugs that Ms. Oliver needed to minimize the risk that her body would reject the organ. Because her kidney was functioning successfully at that point, she was no longer considered to be suffering from end-stage disease and so no longer qualified for the special coverage.
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School seclusion rooms for children with disabilities would be banned under a bill introduced Tuesday by state Sen. Scott Rupp.  He said he wanted to eliminate the rooms “until the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education can prove they serve a worthwhile purpose.”

“If they serve a purpose, then we need to have some type of rules governing their use,” said Rupp, R-Wentzville.
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Arrest warrants for four Corpus Christi State School employees and two former workers were issued Thursday for organizing fights among the mentally disabled just as Texas lawmakers in Austin blasted the state’s top disabilities commissioner for failing to take steps years ago to curb abuse.

Five of the suspects — Timothy Dixon, 30; Jesse Salazar, 25; Guadalupe Delarosa, 21; Vince Johnson, 21; and Dangelo Riley, 22 — are charged with injury to a disabled person, a third-degree felony. A sixth suspect, 21-year-old Stephanie N. Garza, is charged with a state jail felony for failing to report the abuse.
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PARKERSBURG – A Wood County woman is seeking a seven-figure judgment from the state of West Virginia for emotional distress her former rehabilitation counselor is alleged to have inflicted on her.

The state Department of Education and the Arts, and Division of Rehabilitation Services are named as co-defendants in lawsuit filed in Wood Circuit Court by Julie Stoner. In her complaint filed on March 3 with the assistance of James I. Stealey, with the Parkersburg law firm of Goldenberg, Goldenberg and Stealey, Stoner, 38, alleges former DRS counselor Donald G. Howerton, made sexual advances and innuendos on her during a five-month period when she was undergoing rehabilitation and counseling.
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Several anecdotal reports suggest that hyperbaric oxygen therapy, in which children are placed in a pressure chamber with above-normal levels of oxygen, can improve the behavior of children with autism,  and many parents have begun subjecting their autistic children to such treatments, even though it is expensive and not covered by insurance. Physicians, moreover, do not see a biological rationale for why the therapy should work, although some suggest providing extra oxygen to the brain might be responsible for the perceived benefits.
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RICHMOND, Va. — Community colleges in several states are working to establish stronger support systems for former foster-care children, who are more likely to wind up homeless or in jail than earn a degree as they struggle to overcome unstable lives.

Among them is Virginia, where the Community College System’s Great Expectations program uses grants and donations to provide money for tuition, transportation and living expenses. It also connects more than 120 students with mentors, career counselors and other help at seven of the state’s two-year schools.
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MONTPELIER – When federal regulators cited exposed pipes as a safety hazard in denying the state’s latest attempt to regain certification and funding for the Vermont State Hospital, state officials stopped using the space with the overhead pipe — the newly renovated New Directions Pavilion.
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The Department of Managed Health Care declines to require carriers to pay for applied behavior analysis, an expensive therapy that insurers contend is an educational service, not medicine. California regulators said Monday that insurers must provide speech, occupational and physical therapies to their autistic members but rejected pleas to require insurers to cover the cost of behavior therapy that aims to help patients live in society.
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