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Bill Sutton, the principal at Thorndon Primary school, retired last month after 45 years in education and over two decades at Thorndon School. New Zealand has about 2500 schools and principals are appointed and leave every week, so why is this retirement worth commenting on?
It’s because he’s just the principal you want your local school [...]

From Bat, Bean Beam (13 September 2010), ‘a weblog on memory and technology’ by Giovanni Tiso of Wellington. Republished here on humans with his permission.
http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2010/09/questions-asked.html
This is not our daughter’s story, so much so that I won’t even call her by name. It is the story of sixteen months spent battling to ensure that she have [...]

 
 The act requiring the new educational standards regime was passed through all its stages in Parliament in 24 hours just before Christmas 2008. It did not go to a select committee where the public, autism advocates, and those with lived experience, could make submissions. This was unfortunate as some of us could have pointed out the negative implications [...]

Caroline Quick and Andrew Dever are two articulate young adults, who, like many other emerging researchers, are seeking research funding for their work. They have recently left Allenvale Special School in Christchurch and Caroline is currently attending a two year life skills course at CPIT and Andrew is at Skillwise.  They are now conducting their own participatory focus group [...]

I was angered that a significant change to the Education Act was passed by Parliament through all its stages under urgency before Christmas. It increased fines for parents of students who were not attending school, and it made way for publicly notified standardised testing of primary school students (as in the No Child Left Behind policy of the United States). [...]

Ari Ne’eman, who runs the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in the US, has sent out their recommendations about autism to the Obama Transition Team. President-elect Obama has already promised to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and even had autism-specific policies in his election manifesto. These recommendations have been made at the request of the Transition Team, [...]

The NZ Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline was launched at Parliament on World Autism Awareness Day, 2 April 2008. It is a world first in that it is a whole of life, whole of spectrum and whole of government approach to autism. It will be a living guideline so can be updated regularly and have gaps [...]

Last Friday was a great day. An hour before we set off for the Big Day Out, the mail arrived. It contained our older boy’s first set of NCEA results. He achieved every Level 1 standard he sat, and picked up a couple of merits along the way.
For an Asperger Syndrome child we once thought [...]