Pioneer Middle School students created podcasts as a classroom assignment. This team of students focused on neurodivergence and acceptance. Listen to this five minute podcast to hear what they have to say!
DAYTON–Local High School student Kaylee Coleman, receives an adaptive tricycle from the Charge Syndrome Foundation.
Rascal Rodeo rode in to town on Saturday, September 2, 2023 to the Walla Walla Fair and Frontier Days Arena. Rascal Rodeo began 10 years ago as a school project done by Ann-Erica Whitemarsh where she created a rodeo for people with disabilities to get a chance to be a cowboy or cowgirl for a day.
The SOAR program is created for the people who are in it. It is from their voices that each and every social and recreational event is designed around. A few months back I had participants asking about volunteer opportunities. After having a year with most of our participants I have had the privilege of getting to know them. Their likes, dislikes, and personalities. Taking all these things into consideration, the best opportunity would be at the BMAC Food Distribution.
A great night to enjoy ice cream sundaes, meet the new WWVDN Executive Director, and acknowledge the many volunteers and partners who make it all possible!
A look into our week of fun!
Max Park spent about 10 seconds studying the jumbled Rubik’s Cube in front of him at the Pride in Long Beach World Cube Assn. competition last weekend.
Cracking it took less than a third of that time.
With a deep breath, steady hands and just 3.13 seconds, the 21-year-old solved the colorful mind game with 43 quintillion possible combinations, aligning each side perfectly by color.
Post-secondary education (PSE) has a potential for improving the IQ of adults with mild intellectual disability (ID), according to a new Bar-Ilan University study.
The study examined the impact of PSE on students with mild ID who study in a university-based program, known as the Empowerment Project, at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Education.
Tony Snell, a former NBA first-round pick of the Chicago Bulls in 2013, revealed Friday that he was diagnosed with autism last year.
Snell, 31, learned his diagnosis after he and his wife noticed that their son, Karter, wasn’t reaching developmental milestones quickly enough. The two took their son to the doctor, and he was diagnosed with autism. Snell told NBC’s "TODAY" that he began to think about himself and later got evaluated.
The Special Olympics World Games offer the opportunity to unite the world like no other event can. Here people with and without disabilities, people of different nations, cultures, political views and religions meet and can overcome existing prejudices with the power of sport.
From 17 – 25 June 2023, Berlin, Germany will welcome 7,000 Special Olympics athletes and Unified partners from approximately 190 countries to compete in 26 sports. The athletes will be supported by more than 3,000 coaches and 20,000 volunteers.
More than 600,000 Americans have lost Medicaid coverage since pandemic protections ended on April 1. And a KFF Health News analysis of state data shows the vast majority were removed from state rolls for not completing paperwork.
Under normal circumstances, states review their Medicaid enrollment lists regularly to ensure every recipient qualifies for coverage. But because of a nationwide pause in those reviews during the pandemic, the health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans kept people covered even if they no longer qualified.
Now, in what’s known as the Medicaid “unwinding,” states are combing through rolls and deciding who stays and who goes. People who are no longer eligible or don’t complete paperwork in time will be dropped.
Delta Air Lines subsidiary Delta Flight Products has teamed up with UK-based consortium Air 4 All to protoype a new cabin seat option for wheelchair users.
Currently, powered wheelchair users have to use an airline-provided wheelchair when traversing airports and boarding aircraft. After being transferred from chair to chair and rolled down the jetbridge, they will be transferred one more time into a seat.
Their personal chair is checked by the airline and typically put into the cargo hold, and there have been many instances of carriers damaging and breaking the mobility devices — many of which are worth thousands and specifically tailored to the user.
It took Samantha Lesmeister’s family four months to find a medical professional who could see that she was struggling with something more than her Down syndrome.
The young woman, known as Sammee, had become unusually sad and lethargic after falling in the shower and hitting her head. She lost her limited ability to speak, stopped laughing, and no longer wanted to leave the house.
General-practice doctors and a neurologist said such mental deterioration was typical for a person with Down syndrome entering adulthood, recalled her mother, Marilyn Lesmeister. They said nothing could be done.
The family didn’t buy it.
Viktor Bevanda sings while he works, the oil pastel in his hand dashing across the paper as he fills in a sketch of a basset hound with bright, vivid colors.
Bevanda, 14, is an immigrant from Serbia and is on the autism spectrum. He’s semi-verbal, meaning he has the ability to speak, but with great difficulty.
Empathy.
Courtesy.
Information about what sights, sounds and experiences to expect.
Quiet places to retreat if those experiences get overwhelming.
In High Point, tourism leaders are betting if they can offer these basics for autistic people and their families, they can attract more visitors and dollars to the city while becoming more inclusive.
With Global Accessibility Awareness Day just days away, Apple is previewing a raft of new iOS features for cognitive accessibility, along with Live Speech, Personal Voice and more. The company said it worked in "deep collaboration" with community groups representing users with disabilities, and drew on "advances in hardware and software, including on-device machine learning" to make them work.
The first grader with red hair and an infectious smile can do nothing more than watch.
While his classmates run and climb on Robinson Elementary School's brand-new playground, 7-year-old Finn Hall has to stay on the sidelines. He can't get on the equipment because Finn, who has cerebral palsy, is in a wheelchair. There are no ramps — only stairs — and on the ground level, there's little Finn can do but navigate the bright green poles supporting the play structure.
"It is so frustrating," Finn said after school last week.
Morénike Giwa Onaiwu was shocked when day care providers flagged some concerning behaviors in her daughter, Legacy. The toddler was not responding to her name. She avoided eye contact, didn’t talk much and liked playing on her own.
But none of this seemed unusual to Onaiwu, a consultant and writer in Houston.
“I didn’t recognize anything was amiss,” she said. “My daughter was just like me.”
The Senate has confirmed Glenna Wright-Gallo as assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services at the U.S. Department of Education. Secretary Cardona issued the following statement:
“I am thrilled that Glenna Wright-Gallo, a lifelong educator and accomplished special education leader, has been successfully confirmed as the Department of Education’s new assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services. Ms. Wright-Gallo has spent decades supporting students with disabilities and their families both in the classroom and as an administrative leader in the Utah and Washington public education systems. Her commitment to meeting the needs of the special education community and strong track record of improving outcomes are exactly what we need at this critical moment in our recovery from the pandemic, and I look to working with her to raise the bar for students with disabilities and their families.”
Apr. 30—RED HOOK, N.Y. — U.S. Rep. Marc Molinaro, who is the father of child on the autistim spectrum, has introduced federal legislation that provides caregiver skills to families with children who have the same condition.
Molinaro, who represents the 19th Congressional District, said in a statement that the legislation, known as the Autism Family Caregivers Act, is "a bipartisan bill that provides caregiver skills to families who care for children with autism spectrum disorder as well as children with other physical, intellectual and developmental disabilities."
Four Indiana elementary school staff members and a behavioral technician were charged after a 7-year-old special education student was allegedly forced to eat his own vomit with a spoon.
A recent study found that a Medicaid program in Colorado can help address the shortage of home healthcare workers for children with complex medical needs by offering family members certified nursing assistant (CNA) training and paying them for at-home medical care their child requires. Results show that children who received family-CNA care were not more likely to be hospitalized than children cared for by a non-family CNA. Children with family-CNA caregivers also experienced greater care continuity since turnover was not an issue as it tends to be with traditional home healthcare workers. Findings were published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
A national Hershey’s commercial that begins Monday and features the challenges of a Cynthiana second-grader promises to touch “many hearts,” a company spokesperson told the Herald-Leader. Lane Hartzel has cerebral palsy, which in his case means that he is non-verbal and non-mobile. Intellectually, he is “age appropriate,” said his mother, Jennifer Hartzel. He communicates largely through head nods.
Peter Pan & Wendy star Noah Matthews Matofsky has shared details of the 'amazing experience' he had on set after becoming the first actor with Down's syndrome to land a major role in a Disney feature film.
Noah, 15, was cast in Disney's upcoming live-action movie in 2021 after being selected from among thousands of hopeful young actors.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is adopting a new classification of autism that will help further make a distinction between the more and less severe ends of the spectrum.
A study by the CDC published in the Public Health Reports journal found that 26.7% of kids with autism have “profound autism.”
In the fall of 2020, as my son and his neighborhood friends started to trickle back out into the world, my daughter, Izzy, stayed home. At the time, Izzy was 3 years old, ripe for the natural learning that comes from being with other kids. I knew by the way she hummed and flapped her hands around children at the playground—and by her frustration with me at home—that she yearned to be among them.
CNN
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British Vogue has revealed five portraits featuring disabled activists, models and creatives for a series of May 2023 covers, a move the magazine hopes will further important conversations around disability in the media and society.
The “Reframing Fashion: Dynamic, Daring & Disabled” issue stars activist Sinéad Burke, actor Selma Blair, sign language performer Justina Miles and the models Aaron Rose Philip and Ellie Goldstein.
LOWER MANHATTAN, New York (WABC) -- The MTA is celebrating Autism Awareness Month by bringing in children with autism to experience the subway through a different lens.
The kids got the chance to meet and mingle with station agents, bus operators and conductors as part of the experience.
"They have such an affinity to the subway station. So we wanted to create space to celebrate and embrace it and give them an opportunity to meet those running the system day to day," said Shanifah Rieara of the MTA.
About 1 in 6 preschoolers with autism get expelled from their day care program, new research finds.
On average, such kids are about 3 years old when they get kicked out.
While their parents may already harbor concerns, many of these kids "do not as yet have a diagnosis or label," said study leader Jan Blacher, who added that many preschool teachers are not sufficiently trained to recognize the behaviors that often typify autism.
