Autism Speaks fought against and killed a bill (1047) that:
- was meant to ensure school staff would be trained to support nonspeaking students before school starts
- would protect nonspeaking students who need AAC from segregation
- would prevent the use of IQ tests to deny access to AAC
IDEA is supposed to put these protections in place, but they don’t happen. This bill was brought forth because nonspeaking students are still being unfairly segregated and not offered AAC at all.
Teachers want to support nonspeaking people! They want the training!
And Autism Speaks just killed the bill that would help so many nonspeaking people.
So tell me again how they’re so great, because once more they are silencing autistic voices.
Autism Speaks doesn’t want nonspeaking autistic people to speak because it will break the carefully crafted tragedy narrative they’ve built up and struggle to maintain.
A link to the Twitter thread is under the cut so tumblr doesn’t eat this out of tags.
A mom to a nonspeaking child tried to advocate to help her child and people like him and was basically shot down by Autism Speaks.
