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Published on 06/23/1999 All articles from this issue

'It's got to be for love'

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By Joan Passarelli

Special to the Town Crier

The Morgan Center provides schooling for autistic people - and it may leave Los Altos

The Morgan Center

After Mariah started at the Morgan Center recently, it only took about a week to see the difference in her. "She was happier, much less stressed," said her father. "She used to bang her head, but that stopped. She used to tantrum and throw herself on the floor, and get terrible frustrations, but those went way down. She's totally different now."

The Morgan Center is "a very special place," said Felicia Horowitz. "It's the opposite of the other schools in the school district. They serve the cream of the crop, some of the most privileged kids in the world. The Morgan Center takes the hardest kids, the lowest-functioning kids."

"Our kids don't plug into existing curricula or classroom structures," said Louise Emerson, program director of the Morgan Center, who founded it in 1969. "They need teachers with specific training to teach them one-on-one. This kind of teaching works."

Research backs Emerson up. A study on the effectiveness of one-on-one intervention on autism, done by Dr. Ivar Lovaas at University of California, Los Angeles in the early 1980s, clearly showed its benefits. This study, combined with the federal law that requires districts to provide special education services, opened the gates for school districts to fund the kind of one-on-one staffing the Morgan Center uses.

"We're not a private school, but a non-public school," Emerson said. "That is, school districts contract with us for services they must provide, but don't have the resources for on their school grounds. Our kids are publicly funded by public law. So we are part of the continuum of the public education system."

The Morgan Center is the only school of its kind in the Bay Area besides one in Danville, two hours away. It is also one of the rare programs for the autistic that actually teaches them, instead of just babysitting them. It is completely full, serving 52 children and 32 adults, with a long waiting list.

The Morgan Center classrooms are filled, not with loud banging and temper tantrums, but with quiet talking, laughter, and lots of hugs.

Every classroom at the Morgan Center has eight students. To teach them are two credentialed teachers, a licensed speech pathologist, and several aides.

Trevor Robinson was a student having his lesson at the computer. "Please feed me an eggshell," he said, watching the screen. His teacher, Pat Blair, crowed with delight. "He remembers!" she said, as she hurried to put in the game Trevor wanted. Sure enough, the garbage can on the screen said, "Please feed me an eggshell." Trevor used the mouse to click and drag the eggshell into the garbage can's mouth.

Blair speaks more seriously as she watches him. "When he came here, he couldn't play that game, or even speak," she said. "All he would do was tap on the floor."

Now Trevor talks, works on new words and ideas, and especially enjoys the computer. Finished with his lesson, Trevor approaches a visitor and lays his hand gently across her cheek. "Hi," he says softly, looking in her eyes.

Moments like this make their work worthwhile, said Emerson. "We could make more money sweeping the streets or collecting garbage. We've checked," she said, smiling. "We don't do this for money. It's got to be for love."

The autism epidemic

Autism isn't a single condition. Rather, it's a syndrome, or collection of symptoms. Autistic children and adults range from nearly normal functioning to very low functioning.

Autism is defined roughly as "a person's being unaware of their environment, especially their social environment," according to Dr. Bernard Rimland.

Rimland is the founder of the Autism Society of America, and an internationally known expert on autism. He served as primary technical advisor on autism for the film "Rain Man." Long a friend of the Morgan Center, he came to town recently for a visit.

Autism is on the rise -sharply. The state of California just finished a survey on its incidence in the state. Compared to the control conditions of cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and mental retardation, which only increased 3 percent to 4 percent per year, autism is increasing at 26 percent per year, and the rate continues to rise, according to the survey.

Some experts attempt to explain the recent increase in autism as simply an increase in awareness of the syndrome, or better diagnosis. Emerson dismisses this. "We're way beyond that blip," she said. "That was decades ago. In the 1970s, one child in 10,000 was autistic. Now one in every 215 births (locally) is an autistic child."

Besides the overall rise in autism, "clusters" of autism, with even higher rates of incidence, have been identified in New Jersey and in the Bay Area. "Something really bad is going on," Emerson said. "We get three busloads of children from one square mile in Fremont coming to the Morgan Center." But no one knows why. One suspected culprit is early childhood immunizations (see "Do vaccinations cause autism?), but research is ongoing.

Leaving Covington

Mariah Horowitz was waiting for the bus. Wearing a lime-green outfit with a matching hair scrunchie, she galloped around the room in her Los Altos home, occasionally stopping to watch "Barney" on videotape at double speed. "She likes it that way," explained her mother Felicia Horowitz.

Mariah stopped to smile at a visitor, then bounced away again, vocalizing as she went. "This is Mariah," said her mother, indicating her enormous energy. "She's like this all the time. She only needs 2 or 3 hours of sleep a night."

Mariah, who recently turned 8, is autistic. The bus she is waiting for will take her to the Morgan Center, a special program for autistic children and adults housed at the Covington School site.

"We worried that Mariah might be deaf when she was 18 months old," Horowitz said. "She wouldn't respond to her name. We had her hearing tested, and it was better than normal. Then she was diagnosed autistic, when she was about 2. It was a very, very hard thing to hear."

Mariah has a very hard time focusing on her environment and what she needs to do. Constantly active, she needs help almost every waking hour to make sense of her world if she is not to dissolve in frustration.

"Autism is a pretty central disability," said Ben Horowitz, Mariah's father. "Unlike blindness or deafness, which affect peripheral senses, autism affects what's central to processing input."

The Covington School site, where the Morgan Center is located, will soon be reopened as a school to relieve overcrowding in the Los Altos School District. The district has notified all the tenants of Covington that they will have to vacate by June 1, 2000 for construction to refit it as a school.

Kris Stanfield, executive director of the Morgan Center, said, "While the incidence of autism is going up, the number of places to serve autistic people is going down."

Any extra space at the Covington site, once it reopens, will be used for extended day care, according to Kristine Salmon, president of the Los Altos School Board. "When we started finding out parents, needs and desires two or three years ago, they told us loud and clear that child care before and after school was their top priority," she said.

The Horowitzes are leaders in the effort to find the Morgan Center a home. They have spoken with Congress-woman Anna Eshoo and President Bill Clinton about their concern, and recently sent a letter to Los Altos Mayor Louis Becker.

Emerson and Stanfield do not for a moment consider closing the school. "We are not going to close," said Emerson firmly. "We will do it in our garage, if we have to," Stanfield said.

For more information on the Morgan Center's location struggle, call Felicia Horowitz at 949-1706. For more information about autism, check the autism website at www.autism.com, and Rimland's publication at www.autism.com/ari.