The day after the funeral of Avonte Oquendo, the boy with autism whose remains were found this month after he disappeared at age 14 from his school in October, his mother and grandmother stood with Senator Charles E. Schumer as he announced a proposal for a new law. Called “Avonte’s law,” it would finance a program to provide OPTIONAL electronic tracking devices to be worn by children with autism. “Avonte’s running away was not an isolated incident,” Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said at a news conference on Sunday morning in his office on the East Side of Manhattan. “This is a high-tech solution to an age-old problem.” Citing research that suggests nearly 50 percent of children with autism wander off, often to escape the overstimulation of sounds and noise, Mr. Schumer said the new legislation would expand an existing Department of Justice program that grants money to law enforcement agencies and other groups to provide trackers for people who have Alzheimer’s disease. Mr. Schumer said he had contacted the department months ago about including children with autism in the program. There was receptiveness, he said, but money was needed to provide children with the devices, which cost $80 to $90 and a few dollars a month to operate. The legislation would allocate $10 million for the program, giving interested parents free access to the equipment, which can be worn like a watch or even sewn into clothing. Whether to use such a monitor would be up to the parents, and the exact system of employing the devices would be up to individual municipalities, Mr. Schumer said. There are different variants that could be selected, including one that alerts authorities automatically when a child has stepped across a given perimeter — for example, outside school grounds — and another that becomes activated only after authorities are called.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 15:52:34 +0000
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