The Functions of Local Special Education Center of Special Schools : Organization of networks

In School Education Act (2008), special schools are required to support the special education in regular schools in the community. This support function is called "the functions of local special education center" of special schools. The purpose of this study was to show an example of "the functions of local special education center", to make guidelines clear to develop the functions of local special education center through the qualitative analysis on the practices of a special school in the South of Fukuoka Prefecture. The practices are for example, responding to needs of a person with disabilities for supporting social community life and cooperating on a person with disabilities between local regular schools and the special school. The practices showed that organization of local networks among parents, schools and dministrative offices were necessary to function effectively as local special education center. And two guidelines, as follows, to organize networks were also showed. At first, it was available to develop networks among parents, school and administrative offices based on school events. Second, it was also available that personal private network of zealous school teachers cooperated with official network to develop the function -- as local special education center. The former is top-down system and the latter is bottom-up, -- so-called grass-roots, both are complementarily important to accomplish the final purpose to make the person with disabilities belong to their community

Syntactic Comprehension in Patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Recent neuropsychological studies of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have demonstrated that some patients have aphasic symptoms, including impaired syntactic comprehension. However, it is not known if syntactic comprehension disorder is related to executive and visuospatial dysfunction. In this study, we evaluated syntactic comprehension using the Syntax Test for Aphasia (STA) auditory comprehension task, frontal executive function using the Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB), visuospatial function using Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM), and dementia using the Hasegawa Dementia Scale-Revised (HDS-R) in 25 patients with ALS. Of the 25 patients, 18 (72%) had syntactic comprehension disorder (STA score < IV), nine (36%) had frontal executive dysfunction (FAB score < 14), six (24%) had visuospatial dysfunction (RCPM score < 24), and none had dementia (HDS-R score < 20). Nine of the 18 patients with syntactic comprehension disorder (50%) passed the FAB and RCPM. Although sample size was small, these patients had a low STA score but normal FAB and RCPM score. All patients with bulbar onset ALS had syntactic comprehension disorder. These results indicate that it might be necessary to assess syntactic comprehension in patients with bulbar onset ALS. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the pathological continuum of ALS