I've always been kind of a proactive parent when it comes to just going ahead and doing things without waiting for school bureaucracy to creep its weary way along. When my son needed a chair cushion for fidgets, I went ahead and bought one from a catalog rather than endure the six-month purchase-order process his physical therapist would have needed to get one through the district. When the school behavior therapist who was supposed to observe his class in January turned out to be booked 'til June, I went ahead and wrote up my own behavior plan, and his teacher found it useful enough that it rode with his IEP for a few years.
So when I was writing up the latest Enterprising Parents interview, for a company called urTalker, I loved the story of how Jody and Ryan Farris, parents of a nonverbal boy with autism and cerebral palsy, grew frustrated with the years it was taking to get a communication device through the school and the state, and went ahead and developed an app tailored to his needs. The business was up and running and the app completed before the school device finally arrived.
Read more about urTalker, and about other parent-created apps and parent entrepreneurs. Have you used urTalker, or another special-needs app? Write a review.