Important tax breaks exist in the tax code for parents who shoulder the expense of raising a special needs child. Read this important article in the Wall Street Journal by Laura Sanders.
Supreme Court’s help sought to clarify student rights to free speech in off-campus online speech
Check out my latest Examiner.com article on how national school administrative organizations are requesting that the Supreme Court take up a student free speech case to clarify the amount of rights students have to speak their mind online when their speech often impacts what happens at school.
Tenured teacher may lose position over a Facebook post
Through my Examiner.com articles I have been highlighting the struggle that education is facing with the advent of social media. This media is impacting students, teachers, and administrators. Here is another story that highlights the tension existing as schools struggle to balance free speech with the necessity of effectively regulating their education institutions.
An elementary school teacher fromNew Jerseyhas been terminated from her tenured position due to a post on her Facebook page in which she referred to her first grade students as “future criminals.”
Administrative Law Judge Ellen Bass held that the district’s need to efficiently operate its schools outweighed school teacher Jennifer O’Brien’s right to free speech. “In a public education setting, thoughtless words can destroy the partnership between home and school that is essential to the mission of the schools,” she wrote.
The judge was also influenced by what she saw as O’Brien’s lack of remorse for her actions. She noted in her decision that O’Brien did not express genuine remorse at her hearing, stating that Bass had left the hearing with the impression that “O’Brien remained somewhat befuddled by the commotion she had created.”
The ruling allows O’Brien to resume her teaching career elsewhere, just not Patterson, New Jersey, the community in which she was teaching-provided that she undergo sensitivity training.
This ruling is not final though since O’Brien’s lawyer has already declared his intention of appealing the ruling and before even that, the state education commissioner has 45 days to accept, reject, or modify the judge’s ruling.
For further details on this story, please go to the link below.
www.legalclips.nsba.org/?p=10160
Autism onset being prenatal supported by preliminary research
A recent preliminary study in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that autism originates prenatally. In the study, doctors examined the brain composition of seven boys with autism and six typically developing males ages 2 to 16 who had died
Researchers found that the autistic children’s brains outweighed the typical children’s brains by 17.6% and that this excess weight was attributable to to the autistic boys brains containing 67% more brain cells in the prefrontal cortex. How do these excess brain cells show that autism is prenatal though? According to the researcher, Eric Courchesne, the lead author of the study and the director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of California, San Diego, the neurons in this area of the brain are produced before birth and do not continue to grow afterward.
These findings are very important information if substantiated by further research for a number of reasons.
- If the researchers can pinpoint why the extra brain cells develop, it could lead to treatment advances in autism.
- If the brain development is significantly impacted in utero, then environmental factors and vaccination trauma can be eliminated as causes of autism.
- It narrows the period of time during child development when brain abnormalities related to autism begin to occur.
The study’s author notes limitations in his study though. Because neurons can only be counted after death, it is difficult to attain adolescent brain donors. Thus, the study’s results are based on only the thirteen brains mentioned above.