Whalen Corners - March 13, 2019 - When a student enrolls in school, that school gets a cheque for $12,300 to cover the expense for the year, known as a "Grant for Student Needs". That has nothing to do with autism - the student could have autism, they could have athlete’s foot. Doesn’t matter, the school gets the $12,300 to cover the year.

There’s one catch, though. The student needs to enroll by March 31 of the school year. Otherwise the school doesn’t get the money. This is to avoid schools enrolling a student during the few days of the school year and pocketing the money.

What the government did yesterday was basically say "we know our autism program changes are going to cause an influx of students, so we’re waiving the March 31 deadline." That’s it. Nothing to do with autism (other than the influx is being caused by the changes to the Ontario Autism Program). This waiver isn’t particularly rare; it happened a few years ago when Syrian refugees were admitted to school late in the year.

That’s basically all that was announced yesterday. Autism is to be covered in a PD day, but it’s not a "new" PD day, so this just replaces numeracy or literacy or whatever else they were planning on covering. There’s a few extra bucks to run some webinars for teachers. Basically, a whole lot of nothing.

Want a longer summary? Try here.

Senior Director, Smart Prosperity. Assistant Prof, Ivey Business School. Exhausted but happy Dad of 2 wonderful kids with autism. I used to do other stuff.

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