I haven’t blogged in a while. Probably been over a month. Haven’t been too active on Facebook or Twitter, either. I guess it’s safe to say I’ve been a little preoccupied. If you haven’t been here before, there’s a couple of things I should outline first:
1. I’m a father of three and my middle child, 9-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. He’s the “Jack” in Operation Jack. I’ve done a lot of charity stuff in his name to fight autism. That’s the only reason I’m public about anything — I’m trying to make some good out of what he goes through. Click here to see how the Operation Jack Autism Foundation and the Operation Jack Marathon have brought in about $180,000 in the past three or so years.
2. We’ve been in a VERY long fight to try to get Jack into school. He’s been out this entire year. Here’s some backstory. It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever been a part of and quite frankly, it’s sad to know how dirty some people in this world are. In a nutshell, we didn’t like the poor education he was receiving. We hoped the Boulder Valley School District could offer something better than what he was receiving at one of their schools he was attending and they sold us on some allegedly great autism program at a different school they had. Well not only was that program not any better for Jack than the program he was coming from — it was at an unsafe school. The playground he would have been on was 86 feet from a parking lot and UNFENCED! Jack elopes, which means he runs away when he gets a chance. The math of it is that he was less than a two-second lapse in supervision away from a potentially fatal incident at any given moment. So, he’s been out of school this entire school year. [Read more…]