Spurred by Brick Family, $693M in Autism Funding Authorized

Last weekend, President Barack Obama signed a bill authorizing $693 million of federal funding for autism, a move that was inspired by a Brick family.

Bobbie and Billy Gallagher have two autistic children – now 19 and 20 – but began working with Rep. Chris Smith [R-4] when they were 5 and 6 years old. Back then, having more than one child with autism – a disorder that impairs social function – was rare, but the Gallaghers and other families soon realized they were not alone.

"We're not so rare anymore," Bobbie Gallagher said last week in Whiting where Smith was pushing for Obama to sign the bill, which Smith sponsored.

The bill provides funding for three years in three key areas:

• $22 million for the Developmental Disabilities Surveillance and Research Program.
• $48 million for autism education, early detection, and intervention.
• $161 million for hundreds of research grants at the National Institutes of Health, and for the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.

Many of the programs funded by the law will be enacted by individual states through grants to school districts, officials said.

"We're certainly getting better in doing the diagnosis, which is why the research is so important for our kids," Bobbie Gallagher said.

Brick's struggles, as a community, with autism were the focus of a study by the Centers for Disease Control to determine whether there was a "cluster" of autism cases in the township. The study, conducted in 1998 on children between the ages of three and 10, showed that while the rate of autism was slightly higher than normal in Brick, it was in line with a number of other new studies at the time. Since then, the common explanation for a higher autism rate has been the township school district's special education services drawing families to move to town from other locations.

Brick is one of the few districts statewide that offers a large-scale, in-house educational program for the multiply disabled student population, Robyn Magovern, head of the district’s special education department, told Patch in . While many school districts send severely disabled students to out-of-town public facilities or place them in private schools, Brick offers a program that targets the behavioral issues that are present in autistic students and helps students learn in a one-to-one student- to-teacher ratio classroom environment.

Despite millions in federal funding going towards autism, some local officials have said treatment of the condition on a local level is still underfunded. Brick Schools Superintendent Walter Hrycenko has said that the federal government picked up 18 percent of the cost of providing autism services last year. It is supposed to fund such services at 40 percent.

According to the latest research, one in every 94 children in New Jersey has some type of autism spectrum disorder.