Pacific Child, Children's Learning and Autism Services North Connect!

I am proud to announce that Pacific Child has formally joined forces with two great companies, moves that will help us achieve our goal of becoming the preeminent provider of behavior analytic services in the United States.

The first company to join the family is Children’s Learning Connection, based in Orange County, California. The company was started by Melanie Foshee and Kimberly Eissing, two licensed speech and language therapists with expertise in both autism and in bringing scientifically-validated approaches together in a comprehensive and unified way to maximally benefit those in need. Their company provides speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and ABA therapy, as well as parent training, infant programs and social skills programs.

We believe that the expertise Kim and Melanie bring to the coordination of services will greatly assist us in developing a broader menu of services throughout Pacific Child.

The second company to join us is Autism Services North (ASN). ASN is headquartered in Pennsylvania, but the company, begun by Paul Eschbach, BCBA, contracts with BCBAs across 24 states. ASN provides superior behavioral care to the TriCare community and has an excellent reputation with parents and referral sources alike. ASN will allow Pacific Child to provide quality care to more children along the spectrum, particularly across the United States where we currently do not have a presence.

This marks an exciting time in the history of Pacific Child. We look forward to creating new, dynamic synergies among our companies.

Minority Bias

It has been known for some time that minorities, in most walks of life, often do not receive their fair share of services. We know that autism appears in nearly the same proportions throughout all races, nationalities and cultures. But in order to receive the diagnosis, one must be identified by some sort of professional. That is typically a physician.

Several studies have reported that Hispanics have a lower incidence of autism than non-Hispanic Caucasians. Most studies that report these results suggest that this is likely due to the fact that most Hispanics studied have lower income levels, and thus cannot afford the health care required for the diagnosis to be made. This makes sense to me. One study, however, looked at 1184 schools in 254 Texas counties, and counted the number of children in kindergarten through 12th grade in each district who had been diagnosed with autism. In this study, socioeconomic status was in fact controlled for, and the researchers still found fewer Hispanic schoolchildren were diagnosed with autism.

What was fascinating in this study, however, was that that for every 10 percent increase in Hispanic children in a district, the prevalence of autism decreased by 11 percent, while the prevalence of children with intellectual or learning disabilities increased by about 10 percent. Interestingly, the reverse pattern was seen among non-Hispanic Caucasian kids. As their percentage of autism in a district increased by 9 percent, the prevalence of intellectual and learning disabilities fell by about 13 percent.
It appears from these results that Hispanic children may, regardless of their socioeconomic status, be seen as learning disabled, cognitively or intellectually lacking (instead of autistic), while the non-Hispanic children were seen instead as having autism.

Is that surprising?

Congrats to our new BCBA's!

Just wanting to send congratulations to our newest BCBAs-- Daniella Putnam, Robin Palm, Zsuzsanna Fodor and Danielle Christner. This is a great milestone, and well-deserved!