Aspiring Minds of New Jersey specializes in providing advocacy, support and interventions to children with autism. It is a team of parents of children with autism who have gone through their own odyssey in crusading for the educational advancement of their own children. Now, they want to share the experience and knowledge they gained with other parents because they know how unprepared they were when they were first confronted with the diagnosis of autism. They can relate to parents’ initial feelings of anger which slowly gives way to despair and powerlessness in face of the important medical and educational decisions that need to be made. What to do? How to do it? Where to go? What to look for? What works and what does not work? They also want to share their resources with other parents because they discovered through years spent on chasing appropriate educational programs that knowledge is indeed “power” as more they knew and more services their children were getting from the school district. Aspiring Minds puts their multifaceted team of speech therapists, educational consultants, occupational therapists, psychologists and behavior analysts at the service of parents. Among the advocacy services it offers, Aspiring Minds reviews all evaluations, records and assessments, determines whether the child is receiving appropriate services from the school district, prepare parents for I.E.P. meetings, attends I.E.P. meetings with them, assists with the correspondence to school districts, etc. Please contact aspiringminds@msn.com.