Jack wouldn’t be where he is today, as awesome as he is today, without this scholarship, for sure.
We used to live in Florida. Jack was doing special education preschool out there. And we moved to Utah right before Covid. He kept doing SPED preschool here. Once he was in kindergarten for special needs, they said, “This kid’s too smart. He needs to leave.” And I’m like, like but he’s not ready socially but because he was so smart they couldn’t keep him. So there was like not a place for him in the public school system. And then a month after we were kicked out he received his autism diagnosis.
You get a diagnosis, especially during Covid, where it’s virtual and you don’t have that reassurance sitting with a doctor or sitting with somebody to get that, that diagnosis. You turn off the call and you look at each other and you say what do we do now?
We hit the ground running. Finding out what do you do for an autistic child? What does that mean? What does that look like? I feel like there’s so much to learn and there’s such little understanding. With him, it was he didn’t fit in the special needs and he didn’t fit in mainstream. And so now we’ve had to settle. It was pretty stressful. I felt like I got a mom’s PhD in autism in like 2 years. It was like I just ate up everything.
And Cassie is amazing to go and find every resource possible for this little guy, to find what he needed. And it was this scholarship.
The Children’s First Education Scholarship, they were so incredibly helpful. It gave us the options to make mistakes, to try new things.
Being able to have options was exactly what we needed because no child is the same. Having a scholarship that gave us an opportunity to go try ABA therapy, we were able to try private school, try homeschooling.
Found this incredible program called Brain Balance, but it’s so expensive. So, that was a scary thing to invest in. The scholarship enabled us to do that and just took that worry away. So, it was like, okay, we can try anything. It has been the most incredible incredible program from all of it from ABA to everything, speech, brain balance is the biggest thing that has changed our lives, changed his life. It helped him to become more flexible and his behavior calmed down and it just — it just opened up our world.
Autism diagnosis is kind of like a choose your own adventure book, right? You get to a point and it says here are your options in front of you. Without this scholarship, the book just ends right there and you got to go figure it out for yourself and go write your own book. For Jack, it was here are all the roads available to you. And that scholarship was that gateway into all of those pathways behind us that we had no idea even existed. And so we were able to find what worked perfect for for Jack.
Now Jack draws pictures and he is so creative. We’re like, we’re getting the attention he needs finally. We’re finally getting the answers.
A lot of different causes in the world today that you can actually give as a donor, but by donating to this fund, you have helped Jack, you’ve helped our son be able to develop, to be able to grow, to be able to lead a life that we knew he always could, but he needed that leg up. And because of you, you did that for him. And thank you is not enough. These kids deserve to grow. They deserve to learn. They deserve to love. And your, your funds and your donations have made it possible. We will be forever grateful.
He’s just such a gift and I’m so grateful that we’re able to find him again. You’re pretty awesome, buddy.
Everyone needs a Jack in their life.
