Homeschooling  with Autism

Prevalence Rates of Autism

 

 

In Canada, the prevalence rate of autism was reported to be 5 per 1,000 in 2003.

In 2018, reports from The National Autism Spectrum Disorder Surveillance System (NASS) have indicated that the autism prevalence rate is now 1 in 66 children. Boys (statistically speaking) are at a much higher risk of autism than girls.

While I appreciate the efforts of those who work hard to provide the general public with statistical information, there are many flaws with "statistics" and statistical studies in regards to autism and homeschooling.

There is no exact way to determine how many individuals have autism, just as there is no exact way to determine how many children are homeschooled. The number of people who have been diagnosed with autism has risen over the years, however, this increase could also be attributed to more known awareness of autism or the changes in the definitions of the disorder.
 

When it comes to numbers, statistics for autistic children usually come from the number of students that are registered within a Special Education Classroom through a school board or are enrolled in a Government-related Service. It is not out of all students, or even all children. It is important to remember that any children that are completely out of the public school system as like those who are homeschooled or attending a private school, generally will not be accounted for in this statistic.

 

Autistic children are the most common homeschooled group of Special Education students. There can be no accurate number for how many children who are homeschooled, as this number is calculated based on how many “Letters of Intent to Home School” the school board receives. Many parents do not send them into the school board, so again, those children will not be accounted for in that statistic.

 

When reading statistics, you might also wish to consider factors that have been omitted from the study. In this case with both autism and homeschooling:

 

• Children who have been misdiagnosed: There have been many cases where a child has been diagnosed as autistic when they were not autistic at all and had another form of disability. 

 

• There is no way to be sure if the same diagnostic criteria were used the same way in all provinces and it almost is impossible as most diagnoses are done through the observation of the child where the opinions of one person who agrees that the child has autism where another might not agree.

 

• Children who need to be diagnosed but due to having less access to quality diagnostic services in their local area and are missed out on being accounted for due to reasons of large populations where there are wait times, or are in rural areas where services are limited or do not get taken to be diagnosed at all - all which lead to low prevalence rates that are inaccurate.

 

• Sometimes there are cases where schools intentionally mislabel children who are autistic as “Developmentally Delayed with Severity Unspecified” or another diagnosis of something else altogether to prevent being found to be out of compliance with Federal guidelines for teacher certification, and for this reason, many numbers reported are suspicious.

 

• There are older or other individual children with autism who might not have been accounted for and may or may not have already gone into residential/group home care. 

 

 

With these factors taken into consideration, it is almost impossible to calculate an accurate amount of children with autism or an amount of homeschooled children for that matter accurately.