Edward Stanton is a man hurtling headlong toward middle age. His mental illness has led him to be sequestered in his small house in a small city, where he keeps his distance from the outside world and the parents from whom he is largely estranged. For the most part, Edward sticks to things he can count on...and things he can count. But over the course of 25 days (or 600 hours, as Edward prefers to look at it) several events puncture the walls Edward has built around himself. In the end, he faces a choice: Open his life to experience and deal with the joys and heartaches that come with it, or remain behind his closed door, a solitary soul.

The National Foster Parent Association is the only national organization that strives to support foster parents, and remains a consistently strong voice on behalf of all children.

The Mountaintop couple developed an application for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch that helps track behavior in autistic children. Called Behavior Tracker Pro, it was approved this summer by Apple as an "app" and was placed on the iTunes Web site, where it can be downloaded for $9.99. It has been downloaded more than 400 times, and the pace of downloads is increasing.

My name is Betsy. I am a 25-year-old woman. I live in my own apartment, which is great because it gives me the privacy I want and a place to express myself. I can relax in my comfortable black leather lounge chair while I watch my favorite TV shows or I can pretend I am a rock star on stage at a concert. I have a great CD collection and my walls are papered with posters of rock stars. I enjoy experimenting with cosmetics and have created my own great make-up center. By the way, I have Down syndrome.

In September, Autism Speaks hosted the 2nd Annual World Focus on Autism breakfast seminar, chaired by Ban Soon-taek, wife of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. At the event, Suzanne Wright announced that in 2010, the fifth anniversary of Autism Speaks, the foundation would kick off the "Decade for Autism" — a campaign to raise $100 million to fund autism-related research and services over the next 10 years.

The ability to self-advocate is important for kids to learn in order to be successful at all stages of their lives. In the past, self-advocacy was a term applied mostly to adults with disabilities, but recently more focus has been placed on teaching this skill to preteens and teenagers.

Our mission is to to empower all Children & Young Adults with Chronic Medical Conditions and Disabilities, and their families, to obtain Quality Health Care by building on the unique perspectives of Physician-Parents.

The reader can read digital files of books aloud. It can also capture images from any printed material and use its text-to-speech technology to read aloud the publication at a variety of listening speeds. It also has a four-inch color display that can render the words being read in large font sizes. The device can read millions of books that have been formatted online for visually-impaired readers, and it comes with a high-resolution camera that can convert printed text to digital text. The reader can then read the words aloud to the user. It can even work with web pages if users first capture the text from a site in a plain text file.

Welcome to the Family Center on Technology & Disability's Online Discussion Center. Join us this month for a discussion of "Improving Teaching and Learning through Technology." Led by national experts, Lisa Thumann and Karen Janowski, our discussion will range from the specifics of using particular applications for both teacher and student learning to the results of recent research on best classroom practices. Our threaded discussion format allows you to follow individual lines of discussion, start new topics, and easily post questions and comments.

Improving Teaching & Learning through Technology with Karen Janowski and Lisa Thumann

Preventing Challenging Behavior: A Model for Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This web and teleconference event includes a recorded on-line presentation and a live teleconference discussion during which participants had the opportunity to ask presenters questions about the topic.

The National Autism Center is pleased to announce the completion of the National Standards Project and the publication of the National Standards Report.

The National Standards Project answers one of the most pressing public health questions of our time — how do we effectively treat individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)?

"Autistic License" by Stacey Dinner-Levin will be the season opener for Harbor Light Stage's 2009-10 Bold Face Play Readings series. In partnership with the Monarch School of New England, three readings of this award-winning script will be offered from Nov. 6-8, with a closing symposium to follow the final performance.

Long-awaited legislation to replace three federal reading programs—Early Reading First, Reading First, and Striving Readers—was introduced Nov. 5 by U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and would authorize $2.35 billion in funding to improve reading and writing in kindergarten to 12th grade.

Ed Amberg is retiring in December after nine years at the helm of the Montana State Hospital and 30 years of working at the state's mental illness institution in Warm Springs. During his tenure, Amberg has been a key player in the push toward community-based care, which tries to get help for people with mental illnesses where they live instead of in an institution.

Much of the growing prevalence of autism, which now affects about 1 percent of American children, according to federal data, can be attributed to Asperger’s and other mild forms of the disorder. And Asperger’s has exploded into popular culture through books and films depicting it as the realm of brilliant nerds and savantlike geniuses. But no sooner has Asperger consciousness awakened than the disorder seems headed for psychiatric obsolescence. Though it became an official part of the medical lexicon only in 1994, the experts who are revising psychiatry’s diagnostic manual have proposed to eliminate it from the new edition, due out in 2012.

Lawmakers should work to increase the number of special education teachers and establish consistency in the implementation of services when Congress meets next year to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a group of school principals says.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today called on states and communities to join with HHS to redouble efforts to find and enroll the 5 million children who are currently eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), but are not yet covered.  The Secretary issued this call to action as she opened the National Children’s Health Insurance Summit in Chicago, kicking off the nation’s largest campaign to find and enroll uninsured children in over a decade.

Stone, 33, is blind and autistic, and in recent weeks has used leaf raking as a way to earn enough money to go somewhere she absolutely despises: the dentist.