Scholarship, new facility to bring treatment, awareness to Western Kentucky
From being a student with autism to being an advocate of it, Murray State student Ray Chumbler, knows first-hand how challenging life with this disorder can be.
Chumbler is not alone either. About 1 in 68 children are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network.
At 13, Chumbler received the autism diagnosis.
“I always felt I was different. I knew early on I had issues others did not have but did not know that it was because of my autism,” he said. “Because of this I was confused and felt isolated from my peers.”
Chumbler said he was never once ashamed of being autistic but was happy with his diagnosis.
He was given assistance in and out of the classroom to help him learn and behave socially.
“Accommodations, such as being able to get homework left in my locker and extended time on exams, were made available to me,” Chumbler said. “I also went to see someone that taught me social rules, facial expressions, and body language that are commonly used by people who do not have autism.”
In 2008, the CDC reported autism as the fastest-growing developmental disability. Its prevalence increased by 119.4 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to their 2014 research.
Kentucky doesn’t differ from the country’s trend either. The Easter Seals Center found in 2012 that students with autism, ages 3-21, who receive special education services increased from 1.09 percent in 2000 to 3.84 percent in 2010-2011. This was reported in the Autism Spectrum Disorder State of the States Summary Profile.
One of the most difficult factors of being an autistic student in Kentucky is the lack of treatment facilities. The main hub for receiving help is located in Louisville, where Chumbler went to receive his diagnosis. The University of Louisville is home to both the Autism Center, for treatment, and the Kentucky Autism Training Center, for resources and support.
For Western Kentucky, though, that is changing. A children’s psychiatric treatment center in Benton is underway. The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services granted a certificate of need to proceed with development in 2012.
Purchase Youth Village was originally planned for the old Marshall County Hospital building. But due to cost, it has now been relocated to Oak Level Road where a state-of-the-art facility will be built.
This new facility will house 24 beds and be an around-the-clock, home-like environment for children, ages 4 to 21, suffering with extreme autism disorders.
“Our goal will be to get the children over a crisis mode, get them stable and return them to their families,” Dr. Maqbool Ahmed, one of the facility’s developers, told the Marshall County Tribune-Courier. “Autistic children are never a threat to others. These kids can go into crisis mode and need behavioral therapy. Their stay is temporary and our goal is to return them to the community and back to their homes.”
The opening of this treatment center will help many families in Western Kentucky who would have to travel several hours for treatment prior to this.
“Currently patients have to go out of state to be treated and that is very hard on the families,” Ahmed told WKMS. “So the legislature in the state of Kentucky decided about two years ago there’s a need in our state for 145 beds and then they distributed these beds across the state. So basically there’s no other facility like this in western Kentucky.”
Chumbler says it is vital for an autistic child to have someone they can go to for help. He hopes this new center will better equip this area to treat others who are like him and will bring greater awareness to the understanding of autistics.
“As understanding grows it is my hope that the surrounding area will come to treat autistic children and adults more respectfully.”
Ahmed told the Tribune-Courier in March that “he is hopeful construction of Purchase Youth Village can begin within a few months and plans to have the facility fully operational within a year.”
Further details about the progress of the center have yet to be released.
But thanks to Chumbler, more progress is being made for students battling autism in this area. He has created a Murray State University scholarship fund solely for autistic students in hopes of aiding them in their future educational successes.
The Autism Society reported in 2012 that, “35 percent of young adults, ages 19-23, with autism have not had a job or received postgraduate education after leaving high school.” This is based on a 2012 study focused on the postsecondary education and employment among youth with ASD, led by Paul T. Shattuck.
Chumbler said it started as a senior project in high school that required him to do something he had never done and also serve the community in some way. He decided to create a guitar by hand and sold it to start a scholarship fund for autistic students.
The guitar sold for $3,000, starting the funds for this scholarship.
“I’m very happy to say that the Ray IV Autism Scholarship Endowment has just reached more than $17,000 and is well on its way to being self-endowing at $25,000,” he said.
When the fund reaches $25,000, it will permanently be a Murray State University scholarship for autistic students to further their education.
This new university scholarship is a huge statement for the advancement in funding for autism. It may help increase that 35 percent by giving someone the financial ability to attend college, because caring for a child with autism is a daunting financial task.
“It is estimated to cost at least $17,000 more per year to care for a child with ASD compared to a child without ASD,” according to the CDC’s 2014 Community Report on Autism. “Taken together, it is estimated that total societal costs of caring for children with ASD were over $11.5 billion in 2011.”
Health care, education, therapy, family-coordinated services, and caregiver time are all factors in this cost.
Along with scholarships like Chumbler’s, helping in reducing the cost to care for children with autism is House Bill 159, which Gov. Steve Beshear signed into effect April 2010.
This bill was designed to provide more care to children suffering from this disorder. It requires large-group and state insurance policies to provide an annual amount of coverage of $50,000 to children age 1 to 6 and $12,000 a year to children age 7 to 21. For individual and small-group market health benefit plans, it requires coverage of $1,000 per month for pharmacy, psychological, therapeutic and rehabilitative care along with applied behavioral analysis.
Kentucky is making large strides in advancing their funding, treatment and assistance of ASD. With the certificate of need granting Benton, Kentucky a treatment facility along with 145 other beds being placed throughout the state for children’s psychiatric treatment, students like Chumbler may be able to excel more often.
“I can speak from experience how important having someone to go to for help is and I would have greatly benefited from having such a person in my life when I was a child,” he said.
Anyone desiring to donate to the Ray IV Autism Scholarship Endowment may contact Jennie Rottinghaus at 270-809-3406 or at jrottinghaus@murraystate.edu.