In The Politics of Autism, I write about education and the day-to-day challenges facing autistic people and their families.
IDEA does not apply to private and parochial schools.
Katie Yoder at Catholic Review:
According to a report by the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), the largest, private professional education association in the world, close to 1.7 million students attended nearly 6,000 U.S. Catholic schools for the academic year 2022-23.
Only a low percentage of those schools include students with disabilities or learning differences, according to available estimates. The National Catholic Board on Full Inclusion, a nonprofit that supports inclusive education, finds that about 2 percent of Catholic schools include students with intellectual disabilities, while the NCEA estimates that 6.9 percent of Catholic schools have students with a diagnosed disability or learning difference.
“We think that that’s an underreport, by the way, because several dioceses with large numbers of participating students have not supplied data to us,” NCEA President and CEO Lincoln Snyder said. “We also know that there’s a lot of children with learning differences that may not be diagnosed or may not be reported.”
Looking at the data, Colleen McCoy-Cejka, co-founder of Inclusion Solutions, which equips schools to educate all learners, also emphasized that around 20% of the population is neurodivergent, which simply means that differences in their brains affect how their brains function.
“That means every classroom everywhere is neurodiverse,” she said. “What we really want to know is: How many Catholic schools are intentionally addressing the learning differences that are present in their schools with excellence?”
