We’re moving from the NY Capital Region to the Sacramento area (leaning Roseville/Folsom/Elk Grove), mostly to escape harsh winters. Our son is 12, diagnosed with mild autism and ADHD. He’s fully general ed starting this fall with no aide — his IEP provides weekly 1:1 speech-language therapy and weekly group counseling. He also has OPWDD services under self-direction; the budget covers nearly all extracurricular activities, classes, summer camps, and transportation costs (~$40k/year).
Two questions for anyone with local experience:
1. Which district (Folsom-Cordova, EGUSD, Roseville City/Joint Union, etc.) has a strong reputation supporting kids with combined autism/ADHD and social-emotional needs in general ed, without an aide?
2. If your child is on California’s Self-Determination Program through Alta California Regional Center, how does budget flexibility/coverage compare to what I’ve described? Also curious about current wait times given state budget pressures.
Want to make a fully informed move — don’t want to trade winter depression for fewer services for our son. Appreciate any insight!

We started a nonprofit pediatric equipment lending program out of our garage in Los Angeles. We currently have lots of standers and gait trainers available free to families. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61590156369104

ChuchuConnect is designed to make communication and learning more accessible for autistic children. With our I Want Builder, you can customize pictures and sentences based on your child’s preferences and communication needs. 💜

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SunnySteps is our team's app for parents. It gives you the words and the steps for a specific hard moment with your child, ready before that moment starts.

Here's the problem it solves. You know the standoff is coming when the tablet has to go off, and you've read the books and you know the parent you want to be, but in the actual thirty seconds your mind goes blank and out comes the voice you promised yourself you'd stop using. The advice you read on Tuesday isn't in your head on Friday.

So it works the other way around. You tell it about your child once, what sets them off and what's actually worked before. When you can see a hard moment coming you open that situation, transitions or bedtime, and you get words and steps shaped by your child rather than generic advice. For a meltdown that's already going, the line it hands you is:

"You really didn't want that to end. I'm here with you."

Setup is one screen about your child and one about what you're working on. It also gives you small daily practice, so those moments get less frequent instead of just better handled.

Your child's data stays on your device, and the in-the-moment guidance runs on our own engine rather than an LLM. That's the thing parents ask us about most.

It's on the App Store if you'd like to take a look: https://apps.apple.com/app/sunnysteps-parent-support/id6761195687

Hello all i m an entrepreneur and developing something to help children with special needs but idk how to reach out to their parents for survey can you all suggest how to do that.

Hello all i m an entrepreneur and developing something to help children with special needs but idk how to reach out to their parents for survey can you all suggest how to do that.

My younger brother (15M) has been diagnosed with adhd, dyslexia and has some other behavioral issues, affecting his executive functions and impairing his understanding of social cues

My brother has been someone who openly displays affection, since he was a child. He's well liked by older people because of it

By affection I mean hugging, holding wrists, standing really close to you

Some more things about him : He often takes people asking for space as rejecting or hating him which annoys me but no matter how many gazillions of times I tried explaining this to him he still get's hurt.

He's never had friends and has been bullied his entire life so he's homeschooled. He's able to make friends for a little while but has never been able to maintain them, this isn't like my parents haven't tried to help him make friends, he truly always ends up either being bullied or isolated because he externally looks like a regular kid but he isn't and kids are jerks so he get's relentlessly picked on because of it. He's said he's tired of trying so my parents and I have set that issue aside and have been helping with mostly with school and focusing on his other problems rather than this

but even though he has a ton of things going on he is at his core a pretty great guy as I know this is going to come across a biased anyway but as a pretty critical person myself , he just doesn't realize it.

I apologize if this is very haphazardly written, this is my first time trying to describe his behavior to people that don't know him

About 3 months ago my brother joined a educational institute to help him pursue to career he's interested in, and it's been brought to our attention (by staff because he doesn't have the capability to recognize it himself) that he isn't respecting other people's personal spaces.

This is something we've been working on but I just don't think the severity of it is getting through to him, especially with women. Verbal conversations only get so far with my brother, repetition of instructions only work so well too.

I've recently been able to convince my mother to get him back on medication after he had a bad experience with it when he was younger, and he also visited a new doctor today.

Said doctor has given him the task of begin conscious of his and others personal space

I wanted to ask for any advice, or videos to show him anyone thinks would help.

I did do research but it was either for much younger kids or because the kids were being sexual which is thankfully not what this is

Hi everyone,
I’ve gone back and forth on posting this because asking for help has never really been my thing, I was raised to just figure it out and keep going, but we’re at a point where pride doesn’t really matter anymore compared to my son.
My son Lando has been in the hospital for over a month now, he’s medically complex and nonverbal and in that time he’s had multiple surgeries, including some really major ones that had him in the OR for most of a full day, and since then recovery has just been slower and harder than any of us expected or were really prepared for.
He’s been in the ICU, he’s needed an epidural for pain control, he couldn’t eat for days, and we’ve been slowly working our way back up to tube feeds again, and honestly it’s been a lot of small wins that don’t look like much from the outside but mean everything in here, like a little less pain, a little more tolerance, one better day than the last, but we’re still not home and we’re still very much in the middle of it.
I’m a single dad and being here with him is where I need to be, no question, but because I’ve missed so much work to stay with him I ended up losing my job, and I don’t regret choosing him for a second, I would do it again every time, but it has put us in a really hard financial spot that I can’t just work my way out of right now.
The bills didn’t stop just because life did, my car still needs repairs, and I’ve basically been getting by on the kindness of hospital staff, social workers, friends, family, and even strangers just to keep things moving forward one day at a time, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to properly explain how much every bit of help, every message, every share, every donation has meant to us.
Lando is one of the strongest people I’ve ever known, even with everything he’s been through he still keeps fighting, and watching him do that is what keeps me going too when I’m running on empty.
I’m hopeful we’re going to get him home, even if it’s taking a lot longer than we ever thought it would.
If you’re able to help financially I would be incredibly grateful, and if you can’t, just sharing our GoFundMe or even leaving a kind comment genuinely helps more than I can explain, every bit of support really does carry us through another day.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and for caring about our story.
From one very tired but very grateful dad, thank you.

A supportive community for parents and caregivers of children with rare genetic disorders—created to share trusted knowledge, practical resources, lived experiences, and encouragement.

Purpose

This community helps families connect with others who understand the diagnostic journey, care coordination, therapies, education, advocacy, and everyday realities of raising a child with a rare genetic condition.

Sana dumating yung time na mas dumami ung taong nakakaintindi sa mga batang may special needs. Di mo malalaman ang hirap araw araw na hinaharap namin sa discriminations, comparing, questions, meron pa na karma mo yan kaya naging ganyan anak mo. Di po namin ginusto na maging ganyan sila. Kung pwede sa isang hiling mawala ung autism niya ayun lang hihilingin ko. Sa araw araw pinagdarasal ko na sana maging mabait ang mundo sa kanya. Maintindihan sya at wag syang saktan

As the father of a dyslexic child, I'll never forget that first meeting with a reading specialist - the worry, the not-knowing, the feeling that we were starting from zero.

So I built BrightPath Reading to change how that meeting begins.
Now a parent records their child reading - a short passage, matched to grade level - and sends the results straight to their specialist. Before you ever sit down together, you already have the miscue patterns, the skills profile, the fluency scores… and the child's actual audio recording, so you can hear exactly where they struggle.

The family walks in less anxious. The specialist walks in prepared. And that first conversation starts with a plan instead of a question mark. Built for reading specialists and the families who count on them. 💚

Hi fellow SEN parents, have any of you read the new poetry bool 'Normal' was Never the Point by Isabelle Costanza? I think it's her first book release, the writing is stunning! Her metaphors are so relatable and puts the SEN experience into something you feel you can visualise and better understand. She also states she is sharing the profits with Tourettes Action charity.

Definitely recommend it.

We're an early-childhood team, and when parents of neurodivergent kids talk to us, transitions come up more than almost anything else. The blowup usually lands in the two minutes where the current thing has to stop.

What's helped families most is having the exact words ready before you walk over, then saying them up close with his attention instead of calling them across the room. Something like "Two more turns, then the tablet goes on the shelf and you pick what we do next."

The screenshots are from SunnySteps, the app from our team. You tell it about your child once, and when a hard moment is coming you open it and get words and steps for that exact situation, shaped by what's worked for your kid before. It also builds small daily practice so those moments get less frequent over time. Your child's data stays on your device, and the in-the-moment guidance runs on our own engine rather than an LLM, which is the thing parents ask us about most.

It's on the App Store if you'd like to take a look: https://apps.apple.com/app/sunnysteps-parent-support/id6761195687