Gifted and Special Education in Texas

October 12, 2008 by 1 Comment

Going over the news I’ve bookmarked a while ago I found a brief story from FortBendNow.com “FBISD Gifted and Talented Academy Students Connect with Real World,” by John Pope that talked about gifted students “learning about the nutritional perspectives of various cultural food items, including those representative of the Latino, Indian and Asian cultures.”

FBISC is the Fort Bend Independent School District funded by the taxes collected by the Fort Bend County in Texas. The district introduced a gifted program in 1990. According to their Gifted and Talented section of the FBISC’s site, GT program is available for identified GT students at every grade level in every school throughout the district. Kindergartners start getting GT services in February of their Kindergarten year.

Texas has a mandate to identify and serve gifted students, (see the Genius Denied, Gifted Education Policies site), and the programming is partially funded by state.

The mandate “that all school districts must identify and serve gifted students at all grade levels” was passed in 1987. (I found this info on the Texas Education Agency “Gifted/Talented Education” page.)

The “Gifted/Talented Education” page has a lot of interesting links. I especially liked the Texas Performance Standards Project link which led me to the “Texas Performance Standards Project Additional Tasks” page with links to specific projects for various grades.

Other interesting info I found on the “Gifted/Talented Education” page were the “G/T Teacher Toolkit II: Resources for Teachers of G/T, AP and Pre-AP Classes” page; and the “Gifted and Talented Teacher Toolkit,” which interestingly includes a link to a page titled “Seven Essential Instructional Strategies for Powerful Teaching Learning” hosted at the Bellingham (Washington State) Public Schools site.

I wish we lived in a state with a gifted mandate…

But on the other hand, I saw a post on ADD Forums from a parent from Texas whose child has been diagnosed with ADHD impulsive at 3 ½ years old and she did not want to enroll him in a public school because did not want him “labeled as special ed” (post # 7 in the “Came home and just cried tonight” thread) because he’d be “thrown into resource classes or self contained classes.” (post # 27 in the same thread). I guess they don’t do as much inclusion in Texas as they should be. Also, the neuropsych doctor who evaluated my son is from Texas and she said that autistic kids do not get very good services around there.

Yet, the FBISD site includes a page titled “Gifted Students with Disabilities,” which includes a section on Giftedness and ADHD, so I suppose that district does recognize (and possibly serves) gifted students with disabilities.

By the way, in case anyone is interested what (average) kids in Texas are supposed to know at each grade level, here’s the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) page.

Filed Under: ADHD, Education, Gifted and Talented, Special Education, Texas

Food dyes and the Center for Science in the Public Interest

October 10, 2008 by Leave a Comment

This isn’t exactly news – I found this information months ago, when the press release just came out, but I had no time to blog during the summer, so here it is:

An organization calling itself the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban artificial colorings from food. The press release page has links to the petition itself, and also mentions Dr. Ben Feingold with a link to his Feingold Association of the United States, and two British studies exploring the effects of artificial food colorings on children’s behavior.

The first study was published in 2004, in Archives of Disease in Childhood – “The effects of a double blind, placebo controlled, artificial food colourings and benzoate preservative challenge on hyperactivity in a general population sample of preschool children,” by B Bateman, J O Warner, E Hutchinson, T Dean, P Rowlandson, C Gant, J Grundy, C Fitzgerald, J Stevenson.

The second study was published in 2007 in The Lancet – “Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial,” by Dona McCann, Angelina Barrett, Alison Cooper, Debbie Crumpler, Lindy Dalen, Kate Grimshaw, Elizabeth Kitchin, Kris Lok, Lucy Porteous, Emily Prince, Edmund Sonuga-Barke, John O Warner, Jim Stevenson.

The CSPI is also “urging parents who believe their children are harmed by food dyes to file reports online at http://www.cspinet.org/fooddyes/.”

Filed Under: ADHD, National Organizations, Nutrition, Studies and Trials

Biomedical Treatments for Autism

October 8, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Saturday, November 1, and Sunday, November 2, 2008 there will be a conference in Weston, Massachusetts titled “Successful Inclusion in School & Community” organized by Autism Conferences of America.

It looks interesting and I would like to see “Learning Social Skills Through Play: Life’s Most Important Skill Made Fun!” by Rick Clemens, MA, and would love to see “Biomedical Treatments for Autism from A to Zinc” by Nancy O’Hara, MD. Unfortunately $95 to listen to two lecture is a bit steep for me, so I’ll have to pass.

However, the conference web site also includes a pdf of an article titled “Summary of Biomedical Treatments for Autism” written by James B. Adams, Ph.D., which sounds very interesting. James B. Adams is Full Professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at Arizona State University, and Director of the Autism/Asperger’s Research Program.

The Autism/Asperger’s Research Program site includes a pdf of another publication – “Pilot Study of a Moderate Dose Multivitamin/Mineral Supplement for Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder,” by James B. Adams, Ph.D. and Charles Holloway, B.S. published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2004.

By the way, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine is the official journal of the International Society for Complementary Medicine Research and the Society for Acupuncture Research. It is a peer-reviewed journal, it has an editorial board, and the publisher’s web page on Manuscript Submission says “A primary goal of this international peer-reviewed journal is the establishment of rigorous and appropriate research methodologies.” The Editor-in-Chief is Kim A. Jobst, MA, DM, MRCP, MFHom, DipAc, and a Visiting Professor in Healthcare & Integrated Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. 

Now, the developmental pediatrician that tracks my son says the studies so far do not prove whether it’s the nutritional deficiencies that cause autism or it’s the autism that causes nutritional deficiencies. But she did give us a referral to see a nutritionist.

In the meantime, I wonder whether I should ditch the regular vitamins for two months and try to enroll our son in the National Vitamin/Mineral Study for Children & Adults with Autism at the ASU’s Autism/Asperger’s Research Program to see what happens. Of course, there’s the risk that he’d be on the placebo and we personally would not benefit from this study.

Filed Under: Asperger Syndrome, Autism, PDD-NOS, Studies and Trials, Therapy and Treatment