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Rick Colosimo / May 4, 2012
Here’s a short CNN piece reflecting on the costs of autism. It’s not news to those of us who’ve been living with it, but I’m sure it will surprise the heck out of those friends of yours and mine who...
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Rick Colosimo / April 8, 2011
Here’s a short link to one of my other blogs, Watch Rick Train. I’m raising money all year for Reed Academy, starting with the Tough Mudder in Pennsylvania tomorrow and finishing with Ironman Florida in November. My goal is $140,000....
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Rick Colosimo / March 15, 2011
Apparently No Child Left Behind is failing because it’s revealing that schools are leaving children behind. And so schools, rather than contemplate that they’re not doing well, are suggesting that goals be changed so that they can succeed. Seriously? They’re...
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Rick Colosimo / March 21, 2010
This post on paying for our own professionals from rickcolosimo.com was sparked by a health-care editorial, related to prohibitions on sharing legal fees with non-lawyers, and now belongs here. The phrase “doctors and patients as enemies” is what knocked me...
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Rick Colosimo / January 11, 2010
This article on the siphoning of stimulus funds for special education to general education is one of the few I’ve seen in the WSJ on special education. By itself, I think that’s a major achievement — it means that special...
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Rick Colosimo / October 13, 2009
I refer to this as 30seats.com, wth a focusing on creating one classroom at a time to serve our entire community of new children with ASDs. Mission: A program that would collect, create, and curate tools, information, and content to...
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Rick Colosimo / August 6, 2009
This article editorial (original behind paywall) (via this post) from Pennsylvania describes one of every special education parent’s many fears about the due process procedure: having to pay the school district’s legal fees if they lose. Reading the story, and...
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Rick Colosimo / June 30, 2009
This WSJ article illustrates the type of analysis that we should all expect to have to understand as coverage for ABA moves into the mainstream of private insurance coverage and then, theoretically, becomes the responsibility of some national health insurance...
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Rick Colosimo / June 26, 2009
The release below from COPAA describes new legislation introduced to allow for the recovery of expert witness fees in due process hearings and similar proceedings under IDEA. While parents who win at due process can often get reasonable attorney’s fees,...
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Rick Colosimo / June 22, 2009
The discussion about the treatment of the adults working at the turkey farm tied to ideas I’ve discussed before. As I tweeted earlier today, the population of developmentally disabled adults is growing, and the demographics show that we haven’t reached...
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Rick Colosimo / June 22, 2009
(I started writing a reply to Tom’s comment on the Institution or Community post, but I got on a roll and decided my response was long enough to merit its own post.) There are news stories that describe prior confirmation...
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Rick Colosimo / June 18, 2009
Dora Raymaker at Change.org often gets straight to the point when instances of mistreatment are revealed. This post about a turkey farm where developmentally disabled adults were paid $0.44 an hour generates her question about what separates an institution from...
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Rick Colosimo / January 21, 2009
There are about a zillion autism organizations, and many of them have at least some lobbying component. Here at 30seats, we’re generally more focused on thinking about direct action, either in terms of directly helping families in their own homes...
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Rick Colosimo / December 2, 2008
The NYT today has a post about the cost of caring for an elderly parent. One of the projects on our writing list is an article about measuring the soft costs of having an autistic child. We call these soft...
