introduce steven at this time. thank you. thank you, my name is steve and i m a parent of a 10-year-old beautiful boy with autism. and i remember march of last year went by mclaren lodge and i saw you, phil, and i know you have told this story a couple of times how i brought my boy, a.j. there, and said, can you help us? my boy has autism. what can you offer him in the summertime as a camp experience? and that sort of began a long relationship and wonderful time working with you and lucas and a number of other people here that spent time and effort trying to find ways that we could involve both the community, the private sector, and so on, to get this a reality. because it is expensive. the stats are really daunting that you heard from vicky. one in 120. mostly boys. that means one in 40 boys in san francisco has autism. and that s if there was some kind ever external threat that was neurologically damaging our children everybody would be up in arms. because it s mysterio
mentioned at the committee meeting, i was very impressed by his broad background in the city and more specifically in the japanese american community. jack was born and raised in san francisco. his parents immigrated from japan along with other japanese and japanese american individuals was sent to internment camps during world war ii. during that work he helped bring extra dollars. at that point he joined the united states army as a translator and worked under general mcarthur and stayed in japan after the war for a period of time and then he moved back to san francisco and went to college and got a degree in accounting. ended up starting his own business because the prejudice still remained after the war and he was really not able to be hired by large companies. but the this is the great part of knowing about jack after i ve gotten to know him is that he spent all of the time he was away in the country thinking what he was going to do for him and his family and his friend
i do want to say thank you for taking this big risk to provide other cities, i have looked what the city of vancouver has done for their camp, their kids on the spectrum, and they are way ahead of a lot of cities and states, now san francisco has really come to the front and it s something i do want to help fundraising, whatever way we can do. i got tons of ideas. and i d like to see the camp grow from 20 campers per week to hopefully more. just to say it would be great to have more options. this camp filled up in two days. this was in march. it went on line, bam, there was a long waiting list. it would be nice to expand the age range to include kids from 13 to 18 years old. there s many, many, many directions we can go to see this very successful project grow. this is a little three-minute clip. each one has a one-on-one special time for them and they follow them with the one-on-one aide and let them go on and explore themselves and we guide them. whoa! you don t w
walking and hiking, jake has an awk wardgate. he s usually wearing knee length orr thodics and could not walk long distances. he made friends. jake has a hard time making friends in his autistic classroom given some of his students were not interested in being social. he often resorted to attention seeking behaviors to make friends by teasing or pushing. at camp azure his counselors were able to help him facilitate positive relationships. he became very close to three boys that he was grouped with. he has decreased in negative behaviors. jake has learned to have fun. it seems that his negative behaviors have decreased and he s choosing to participate and have fun instead of throwing tantrums and resorting to negative behaviors and attention seeking behaviors. and the last one, the camp appeared to provide a well supported and safe environment for kids with different abilities. after a month absence from his karate class that coincided with camp, jake returned to his private k
all right. so that s just a glimpse of those successful four weeks and i d like to have sally come just for a couple minutes and share with her with you personal experiences regarding this. thanks. just want to thank parks and rec and especially steve and vicky for the amazing summer my son had. jonah is 10 years old. he s severely autistic. he s not verbal. every year we get the park and rec wonderful offerings. my daughter talks about what she s going to sign up for. it s it s what can we do for jonah? jonah goes to camp mom as steve alluded to and it s just not the same as being out with other kids his own age. it s so good for the kids. it s so good for the families. it s so good for the siblings to see their siblings can go out. jonah has not been away from me. steve s son, my son, they re quite affected. they are not going to go into new spaces, overwhelming spaces without a structure and support and every day jonah happily got out of the car, ran to his wonderf