Are California and Texas good states?
| Back to Autism Information >> Next Topic | ||
|
I have a 3.5 PDD-NOS, we live in NY where we can have a lot of services but we are planning to look somewhere else where it would be easier for my husband to get a job in september. We were thinking about California or Texas but i don't know if those states provide good services for high functioning kiddos. I heard that Wisconsin is the best with New Jersy and NY, i don't know about the others. Thank you very much Coming from Texas...overall, it's not great. There are some pockets of good school districts, but most of the time it's a battle to obtain services, particularly for high-functioning kiddos. I moved my family last year to Missouri from Texas...solely for the reason that I was not getting from the district what my son needed. We have made remarkable progress here. Thank you very much so we will consider Missouri then. The problem is exactly that some states are very good for some children on the spectrum not all of them. If you have an aspie or high functioning kid it is difficult to generalize.Thank you I live in California. As you may know, it is a very big state. Southern California has a lot of resources available for our kiddos. But it is VERY expensive to live down there. Northern California has some resources too. Unfortunately for my DD, we live in Central California, and it is awful. There isn't even anyone who knows anything about autism in the Fresno area. I had to take my child down to Pasadena in Southern California to get a diagnosis. There are no autism schools in central California...I'm not sure if there are any in Southern California although I suspect there are, and I am sure they are quite expensive. Unless you can afford to live in Southern California I would avoid California like the plague. We live in SF bay area and I work in Silly(Silicon) Valley. We are in the east bay. Unlike the previous poster we have had a lot of great services and the schools have been wonderful! My son is also high functioning but was not when he was first diagnosed. I attribute a lot of his improvement on the schools. Pleasanton school district is one of the finiest. I have had no issues and they are wonderful working with me. My son will enter high school next year and, though I am nervous, I am confident it will be as great an experience as k-8th has been.i am living in texas and i have to agree with previous poster that it isn't easy here to obtain services. my 9yr old has been diagnosed since age 4 and i'm still having probs finding and getting help with services, idk mayb i'm just not good at looking for them. my son's teachers work well with him and seem to be genuinely interested in better serving him but the prob seems more deeper than my school districk {abileneisd} I am in Texas myself....Fort Worth area to be exact. We ended up moving to a smaller city in Castleberry ISD back in January of 2007. It was a very smart move and my kids school's Special Education department is great!!! Skye's PPCD teacher was honored with the Baynard H. Friendman "Hero Award" last year and she is so awesome! Her name is Mindy Holland and she was selected as the most outstanding special education specialist in North Texas. I sure do miss having her as Skye's teacher. I was told that Skye would benefit from ABA therapy and at the last ARD meeting we enrolled her in an Autism Treatment Center, at the school's call and I believe that our MHMR services are paying for that. There are tons of services out there, its just that some are so expensive and way out of range for most. I couldn't believe the list of schools that I was given when we first took Skye to The Child Study Center. The majority listed gave no financial assistance at all and the tuition was almost $10,000!!! It seems to depend on the attitude of the higher up management as to how parents get treated. Of course if we moved maybe 20 minutes away we could be a couple of school districts away from this armpit. Incidentally CA is something like 47th is per pupil spending in the USA. We live north of San Francisco Bay in Marin County and are very disappointed with the amount we've had to struggle to get either a diagnosis or services provided. If you look at the other posters above from California, it depends completely on where you live, the attitude of the school district, and local availability. In Marin County and Sonoma County to our north, there are services available, but the Marin Co Office of Education is difficult to deal with. As a result, we've sought services out of pocket. There are good folks out there, but without a local experienced guide, they are extremely difficult to find. I must say our success in getting help is completely Providential; my wife has bumped into neighbors on the street or advocates at a concert who have pointed us in the right direction. Our sense having lived here almost three years is that those who live in the safe areas east of San Francisco Bay (East Bay) are in a better, more family friendly region than we do and was not surprised to read that everything worked out OK for the poster in Pleasanton. However, these areas are out of reach for regular visits for those of us in the North Bay or Central Valley. California is a mixed bag in general. If you've heard the discussion on the national news about the state budget, the impacts are being felt at the local levels in terms of services available. With an IEP coming up in early March, we're quite curious to see how the new budget will impact the school district's attitude. This website might help. Easter Seals has a state-by-state profile of autism laws/services. http://www.easterseals.com/site/PageServer?pagename=ntlc8_au tism_state_profiles |
||
|
Copyright Autism-PDD.net
|
I see her almost every day but its not the same. She actually lives right down the street from us.