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Budget cuts in many school districts have some parents and teachers questioning whether they have the resources to support their students. NPR education correspondent Claudio Sanchez and Thomas Hehir of Harvard University talk about how to integrate special needs students into mainstream classrooms.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly one percent of U.S. children have some form of autism, 20 times higher than the rate in the 1980s. Alan Zarembo of The Los Angeles Times and clinical psychologist Catherine Lord discuss what's behind the growing number of diagnoses.

Many people know how to respond when colleagues hurt themselves, or are felled by heart attack or stroke. But few know what to do in a psychiatric crisis. The Mental Health First Aid program aims to teach people to respond to psychiatric emergencies, from anxiety to eating disorders to psychosis.

Research overwhelmingly shows that parental involvement in a child's education improves academic performance. But there are a lot of reasons why parents keep their distance -- including cultural and class divisions. Guests discuss strategies to get parents more involved in their kids' schooling.

Olivia Welter is 20 years old and gets all this life-saving medical care through a program provided by Illinois' Medicaid program. But it's a program for children. And when Olivia Welter turns 21, at the stroke of midnight on Nov. 9, she is no longer eligible for that care.

The concepts are simple: Don't bully, help those who are being bullied and tell an adult what's going on. Pearre tries to reinforce the idea that the bully doesn't act alone. The community can take away the bully's power by refusing to cheer him on, by telling an adult, or perhaps the ultimate step: stepping in to help the victim.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan feels that the old standard, No Child Left Behind "was, frankly, broken." He explains, "it was far too punitive -- everybody was going to be labeled a failure, eventually." He hopes, with Race For The Top, to raise the bar, to "reward excellence in growth, how much schools are improving each year," and how much graduation rates increase.

Jessica's daughter, Isabelle, has Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder with a number of symptoms. Children with Williams are often physically small and frequently have developmental delays. But also, kids and adults with Williams love people, and they are literally pathologically trusting. They have no social fear. Researchers theorize that this is probably because of a problem in their limbic system, the part of the brain that regulates emotion. There appears to be a disregulation in one of the chemicals (oxytocin) that signals when to trust and when to distrust.

SMA, which stands for Spinal Muscular Atrophy, occurs in one of every 6,000 births. Commentator Ben Mattlin has a SMA and is paraplegic. He is often asked what he would do if a cure became available. His answer: He wouldn't choose to be cured.

For most of his life, music critic Tim Page felt like an outsider. Restless and isolated, he was overstimulated and uneasy around others. Finally, when he was 45, Page was diagnosed with Asperger's, a syndrome that falls within the autism spectrum. As Page explains in the prologue of his new memoir, Parallel Play: Life As An Outsider, the diagnosis came as a relief: "Here, finally, was an objective explanation for some of my strengths and weaknesses," he writes.People with Asperger's often struggle to interact with groups and understand social norms. Page describes himself growing up as a "very lost little kid" who acted out in school by making faces at teachers and being aggressive with the other students. His ability to connect to others didn't improve with age.

Mental health issues like depression, anxiety and substance abuse often start in adolescence, then peak in young adulthood. But for young people who don't have steady jobs or stable paychecks, getting help can be tough. A popular provision of the Affordable Care Act that took effect in 2010 aimed to make it easier for young adults to get access to health care, by allowing them to stay on their parents' insurance until they turn 26. So, are more young adults getting help with mental health issues because of the provision? Maybe, suggests a study published in the September issue of Health Affairs.

Zach Sayne was 25 when he died earlier this month at the place that had been his home for 15 years — a children's nursing home in Alabama. But that was too far away, 200 miles too far, for his mother in Georgia. Nola Sayne was trying to bring him back, closer to her home. The story of why she couldn't reveals the bureaucratic traps, underfunding and lack of choices that plague state Medicaid programs.

There was a time when a child born deaf had few choices. For more than a century, the only option for parents was to send their son or daughter away to a boarding school for the deaf. There, the children and the schools thrived in the shadows, embracing a distinct culture of silent communication. Recent advances in medicine and technology are now reshaping what it means to be deaf in America. Children who could never hear a sound are now adults who can hear everything. That's having a dramatic impact on the nation's historic deaf schools as well as the lives of people.

Katie Beckett died Friday morning in the same hospital where she'd once made history. Beckett was 3 years old when her case changed health care law. She was 34 when she died. NPR's Joseph Shapiro explains why she was important to other children with disabilities.

Flu is most deadly for children with neurologic problems and disorders, an analysis of swine flu fatalities finds. The results come from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers who looked at childhood fatalities during the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, when there were five times the usual number of deaths. In all, 43 percent of the deaths occurred in children who had neurologic diseases, such as cerebral palsy and epilepsy, or developmental disorders.

ATLANTA (AP) — More parents are opting out of school shots for their kids. In eight states now, more than 1 in 20 public school kindergartners aren't getting all the vaccines required for attendance, an Associated Press analysis found. That growing trend among parents seeking vaccine exemptions has health officials worried about outbreaks of diseases that once were all but stamped out. The AP analysis found more than half of states have seen at least a slight rise in the rate of exemptions over the past five years. States with the highest exemption rates are in the West and Upper Midwest.

Soniya Patel's 3-year-old daughter loves getting a book in the mail each month. It comes from the Dollywood Foundation's Imagination Library, which sends free books each month to hundreds of thousands of children. But Patel is blind, so reading new books to her daughter isn't so simple. Patel has the book read aloud to her, and she transcribes the text on her Braille typewriter — and then she can read the new book to her daughter.