Sitting before the Florida House and Senate right now are two separate budgets.  The House budget cuts funding for the Florida Medicaid waiver system for providers by 10% across the board, while the Senate budget plan has a 6% across the board budget cut.  I just don’t get it. 
It doesn’t take a Rhode’s Scholar to [...]

Whether you agree or disagree with the legislation that was voted upon by Congress and signed into law by the President this week, there’s one thing clear to me.  Healthcare for the developmentally disabled is not going to change for the better nor has it even been discussed! 
First of all, allow me to step on [...]

I came into work one day this week so excited about something I read the night before.  When one of my little guys was ill, I turned to The American Academy of Pediatrics, “Caring for your Baby and Young Child” book that I received as a member of the Publix supermarkets Baby Club.  While nearly [...]

Day in and day out I have the opportunity to witness little miracles, and by “little” I mean in the literal sense as the children about whom I’m speaking are all under the age of three.  In the ARC Marion Early Intervention Program(EIP), children with varying intellectual and developmental disabilities attend classes five days a [...]

In recent blog posts (here, here, and here) I havepretty vocally noted my appreciation for all the Sarah Palin is doing to draw attention to the special needs community.  She’s being praised and ridiculed, uplifted and degraded by the masses for her strong stance against the use of the word “retarded” in a derogatory fashion.  [...]

The Florida legislature just went into session last week, and there are already very pertinent pieces of legislation pending that could greatly affect the citizens ARC Marion serves and the developmentally disabled across our state.  In fact, in the next 14 days, the Senate and House Appropriations Committees are considering two options to further reduce funding [...]

From time to time our email inboxes can be inundated with the equivalent of spam sent from well-intentioned, forward-happy friends who are touched by a story they read online and choose to send to everyone else to be touched as well.  The thing is, so many times those forwards come from folks who have a lot [...]

We are working on some new literature at ARC Marion that will hopefully tell and show what we do.  The motto for some time has been Clients First! And we are keeping it.  Our Web site portrays it best with red exclamation points literally all over the site.  However, we have never allowed it to [...]

A blog post last week mentioned a basketball encounter my husband had at our local YMCA where he stood up for a fellow player who had special needs.  I received a lot of comments from people I know who had read the blog and heard the story, but one email in particular came from someone [...]