Communication Pathology

   Alright team, it's been a little while since I last posted.  Work stuff has been going on, and while it's usually a lot easier to write from current experience, it's also stuff that I've covered on Paraconfessional before.  As much as I love to hear myself talk (watch...  myself write?), I am not big on beating dead, live, half-dead, or any kind of horses in general.

   I actually have been trying to do some interviews and research for a couple of topics I'd like to cover over the next month.  The Title for this topic group is "Communication Pathology", which is sorta why I named the post that.  What I'd like to explore is how the different organizations that provide a majority of the current-day structure of the Special Needs world have made it difficult to provide a service that is valuable to the population that we serve.
   The idea is sort of simple.  Companies that provide the standards (which then become the 'structure') for care, also charge an obscene rate for those standards.  From computer programs like Boardmaker, to Nonviolent crisis training institutions, specialty companies develop intellectual property that many organizations and participants are taught to rely upon, and when those participants transfer between programs, the new host program must either decide to purchase into the company whose standards are being used, or allow everything that built a participant up to fall by the wayside.

   And let's face it, with how hard it's been for programs working with Special Needs to rake in dough lately.  When participants reach adulthood, many programs simply drop the supports and see if the participant still fits into their program.  If they don't, they get cut, and they try again with another potential participant.

   I expect that my next post will be about Boardmaker and Dynavox.  Either within that same post, or the next post over, I plan to cover News 2 You, Unique, and Symbolstix, compare and contrast, and go over the implications of the company-owned standards of education that proffer in our field.  I plan to explore the history of, and the current systems in which these programs exist.
   I then plan to cover how nonviolent training programs work, how trainings work, where the certifications awarded are considered valid...  And describe in general the way that the different programs compare and contract, and if possible, some demographics behind where the certifications are more common.

   I may approach other specialty devices, and do a clarity piece which explains the difference between the business of working with devices which have a limited population in their demographic range, and the ethics and business structure behind companies which develop specific standards which we have to utilize in the field to be safe and useful to our clients.

   After that, I plan on going into Always Learning While Living, how we got started, what a person needs to do to make an Adult Day Program for Adults with Special Needs in Illinois, and that sort of stuff.  I've been procrastinating on it long enough, and I know that there's an interest out there to know some of the specifics about it.

Alright, all, peace until my next post.  Happy Friday!