Aspies For Freedom

*FROM SCHAFER REPORT***

Texas Woman Supports Gravelles

     By Matt Hutton – Reflector, Norwalk, Ohio
http://www.norwalkreflector.com/index.ht...lectornews

     Not everyone in America thinks the worst of the Gravelles and some
want to offer their support to the parents.
     Michael and Sharen Gravelle, 2330 St. John Road, have been accused of
having their 11 adopted special needs children sleep in cages, but no
charges have yet been filed.
     While she is waiting to see what other information arises about the
case, Kim Butler from Lindale, Texas, contacted the Reflector in hopes of
talking to the Gravelles to offer her sympathy. Having a child herself who
would qualify as special needs, Butler said the situation probably is not
what the media is making it out to be.
     "Based on what I've read ... it sounds like they're doing all they
can," she said, adding if she could talk to them it would be "more of a
supportive measure."
     A statement issued by the Gravelles lawyer David Sherman states that
the children set fires, cut themselves, "pulled out nearly all of their
hair," damaged the home and injured each other.
     Raising a child with autism is a full-time job, Butler said, and
instead of jumping to the worst conclusions, the parents should be applauded
for being willing to take on 11 special needs children.
     One child in every 166 will be born with autism, a developmental
disability that affects social interaction and communication skills,
according to the Autism Society of America.
     Butler's son has what she calls "fits of rage," where it is impossible
for him to control his anger. That can cause him to be a danger to himself
and others, and sometimes she is forced to lock him in his room until they
subside. She also has replaced her son's window with Plexiglas so he cannot
break it, and he wears a special bracelet that sets off an alarm if he
leaves the house without her. These are in addition to therapy and research
work being done at a clinic in Chicago, which has greatly reduced the number
of her son's fits.
     She said the cages or "enclosures" allegedly used by the Gravelles are
more strict then her measures, but she is only raising one child, not 11,
and it might make sense for their family.
     "I couldn't imagine taking on so many children," she said.
     People with autism can have difficulties in verbal and non-verbal
communication, social interactions and leisure or play activities. One way
Butler has been able to combat the communication problem is to have her son
use a picture book to describe what he wants and feels.
     Regardless of the outcome of the case in Clarksfield Township, Butler
said she hopes one good thing will come out of it -- increased awareness and
government support for parents with autistic children.
     "I think it's a huge red flag," she said. "A lot of parents can't
handle (children with autism) and they give them to the state.

I thought that regular checks had to be made on foster parents, to see how they were coping, especially with such a large family.

That couple had a much easier choice to say to authorities 'we cannot cope' and had at least some of the children put in another home.
That is not as hard as a natural parent who has had no contact with authorities before,  phoning up and saying 'take our child, we can't cope'.

But amy the subtle message it is okay to what is unthinkable for NT children to autistic children. This is not to say some kids dont need to be restrained, but cages?? cages? please.

I'm sorry, but no way should a couple be allowed to adopt 11 special needs children!   :shock:

Even to raise 11 NT children would be demanding on a couple, but special needs means they have needs over and above those of NT children, they need more time, more care, and more attention.

WTF were the authorities doing allowing a family to adopt 11 special needs children?

This is one case where foster parents severely neglected and endangered their foster children, they were NT kids, and the authorities negelected their duties too.

DYFS let four kids slowly starve
Child advocate's report on Collingswood family case lists years of poor judgment by agency

Through negligent casework, ignorance of the rules and poor internal communication, the state's child welfare agency allowed four "intentionally malnourished" adopted children to live in near- starvation for almost a decade, according to a blistering report released yesterday by New Jersey's Office of the Child Advocate.

Years before Collingswood police responded to a middle-of-the- night call about a "little kid" eating out of a neighbor's trash can, the New Jersey Division of Youth and Children Services should have known that there was something terribly wrong, Child Advocate Kevin Ryan found.

The "little kid," weighing 45 pounds and standing 4 feet tall when found foraging for food on Oct. 10, 2003, was actually a 19-year-old man, Bruce Jackson. At the home of his parents, Vanessa and Raymond Jackson, were three younger brothers just as deprived.

Yet DYFS workers who visited the Jackson household on at least 38 occasions since 1999 failed to do anything about their appalling state, the report documents.

"None of (them) apparently noticed the stark underweight and underdeveloped conditions of the four boys, or did anything about it if they did," Ryan wrote.

The Jacksons have been charged with child endangerment and assault. Bruce Jackson, still living in a hospital but thriving "on a normal diet," has gained 37 pounds and grown 6 1/2 inches in the last three months, the report states. His brothers, in foster care along with three other Jackson children, also are doing well.

Ryan's 35-page report provides a chilling portrait of bureacratic dysfunction. Since the Jacksons became foster parents in the summer of 1991, it concludes, DYFS did almost nothing right in caring for the boys it placed with them.

His findings include the following:

# Although physicians, school officials, therapists and even DYFS workers took note of the Jackson boys' emaciation on numerous occasions, DYFS never investigated to find out what was behind it.

"In every case, these signs were dismissed, ignored or overlooked by the state Department of Human Services and the Division of Youth and Family Services," Child Advocate Kevin Ryan said at a news conference in Newark.

# Contrary to claims by Vanessa and Raymond Jackson, there is no evidence to suggest the Jackson boys suffered from any medical conditions prior to their adoptions.

Its not a recent case, but it was thought so bad at the time that it made the news in the UK.
link

Sounded to me like these foster parents just were people who took on these kids for money for booze.

It doesn't state if all 11 'special needs' children were autistic or handicapped in other ways. I have no idea how anybody would care for that many autistic children. If they're your own, you get help. But as foster parents, it simply shouldn't be allowed.

Now, if these kids will wander out of the house during the night, hurt themselves or each other, it would normally be impossible for the caretakers to get any sleep at all. So, in a way, putting enclosures (cages, if you will) around their beds doesn't seem so unreasonable, if they aren't in there during the day and are well looked after and not otherwise abused. It seems more a measure of safety than anything else.

Still, if the authorities will give them that many kids to care for (and the foster parents may genuinely want to help these kids and be concerned for them), then they are partly to blame if drastic measures like enclosures for the night need to be taken.

Mind you, (provided that these kids are well fed and looked after properly during the day) this situation might be an awful lot better than an institution. Obviously the parents either don't want these kids, or they have been taken from them, and often these kinds of kids will then end up in institutions, which are horrible places for anybody.

In the case of the boys in the second case, I completely agree. Too many foster parents take kids only to make money, and don't care about the kids at all. I personally know a couple who can't have kids who have been taking teenage boys for the past two years, and they genuinely love the kids and don't even need the money at all. They just take them to help them, and they like having kids around. But I have heard of terrible abuse by foster parents as well.

There was a really stupid policy here where it was considered all kids should eventually be returned to their biological family, no matter how unfit the parents were and how badly they abused their child/ren.

Foster parents would spend a lot of time and effort to nurse a sick and injured child back to health and gain some degree of trust from them and then all their good work would be undone when some officious bureaucrat would decide the child should be returned to an abusive home.

Some children would be passed from foster home to foster home because they were so damaged by this process that their behaviour became extremely challenging.

I think the reason for some foster parents to be quite unfit is because there was/is a desperate shortage of people to take into foster children and their credentials/personal qualities were not taken sufficiently into account.

Also, some of them expected to get a "normal" child and were not prepared for dealing with a child who was emotionally damaged and therefore, often presenting with much "bad" behaviour.