School District 57 saw a large increase in the number of students with autism from 2023 to 2024, according to figures presented at the board of education’s Tuesday, June 10 meeting.
At that meeting, director of instruction for inclusive education Lisa Horswell gave an update on her department’s work with students with disabilities and chronic illnesses.
To provide accurate educational plans that meet students’ needs, Horswell said staff need specialized training as well as mental health and wellness supports.
Her presentation said that students with special education designation make up around 14 per cent of the school district’s entire student population.
On top of that, 25 per cent of students without those designations are supported by the inclusive education department at some point during the school year.
A graph in the presentation compared the number of students in each of the 14 special education designations in the district in both September 2023 and 2024.
There were 23 students with physical dependency issues in 2023 and 27 in 2024.
In 2023, there was a single student who was deaf and blind. In 2024, there were two.
The number of students with moderate to profound intellectual disabilities went down from 47 in 2023 to 25 in 2024.
Students with chronic health conditions like diabetes and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder increased by 16 from 249 in 2023 to 265 in 2024.
The district had five blind students in 2023 and seven in 2024.
There was a slight decrease in the number of deaf and hard of hearing students from 22 in 2023 to 20 in 2024.
The number of students with autism saw the largest jump with 418 in 2023 to 628 in 2024.
The second-largest increase was with students with intensive mental health issues, going from 300 in 2023 to 345 in 2024.
There were 136 students with mild intellectual disabilities in 2023 and 144 in 2024.
In 2023, there were four students considered gifted. That went down to three in 2024.
The Gifted Children’s Association of BC describes gifted children as “a subset of people born with distinctive, innate, neurological differences. Inherent in these differences are intellectual and talent-based capacities which score far beyond average.”
There was a small increase in the number of students with learning disabilities from 364 in 2023 to 380 in 2024.
The final category is students with moderate mental health issues. It saw a decrease from 106 students in 2023 to 73 in 2024.
Discussing the changes, Horswell said some students might have graduated or moved to a different designation.
“We have a lot of students coming into our district, starting in kindergarten or coming in on diagnosed autism-like traits that are just waiting to have an assessment,” she said.
“We have a massive amount of students on waitlists for assessment. I’ve been doing this job for 10 years and when I first started in this position, I remember very distinctly us having 169 autistic students in our district … we are now at 628. Ten years later, that’s approximately a 325 per cent increase.”
The current waitlist for an autism assessment is around three years for the public system and 18 months for a private assessment, Horswell said.
“Every district in the province is seeing an increase specifically in autism,” she said.
Students with physical dependencies are those who require an educational assistant who works directly with them. These, she said, are usually wheelchair-bound students that need assistance with lifts, transfers and feeding.
The first priority for the district’s assessments each school year, she said, is to reassess students with intellectual disabilities who are turning 16 and may qualify for Community Living BC funding when they become adults.
The second priority is to reassess Grade 7 students who have previously been diagnosed with intellectual disabilities or developmental delays. Horswell said that in many cases where a student has been diagnosed with FASD or autism, there are also comorbid conditions present.
Priorities three and four are new assessments.
Horswell said that there’s a misnomer that psychological education assessments act as cures, creating a miraculous intervention once a diagnosis has been provided.
“Schools are so good at identifying that there is a learning disability or an intellectual disability that a psychological educational assessment just already confirms what you know and they usually carry on with the practices,” she said.
“A great set of recommendations is usually produced, but schools are very good at recognizing what’s going on for a child.”
