Good morning, my fellow Miamians 🦩

This week brings the story of how states decided whose life was worth saving in a crisis and a look at how the new Trump Accounts can cost a child their benefits. The one I’d start with is the ventilator piece, because the rules it describes were written years before anyone was looking.

On the new podcast episode, I sit down with Dr. Eglee of STARS Autism School and Marly Q of the PARK Project to work through whether a Miami private school has to honor your child’s IEP, or not.

Victor Antunez | 305.401.6224

Real Estate Professional 🔑 Autism Dadvocate

PS. If buying or selling a home is on your mind, and you want to talk it through, text or call me at (305) 401-6224

PSS. Nothing means more than a real estate referral. If someone comes to mind, please send them my way.

Today's Edition Includes

1. Probate & Your Child's Future: Live webinar with Carlos Aguila of Aguila Law and Victor Antunez
2. Trump Accounts: The $1,000 Gift That Could Cost Your Disabled Child Their Benefits
3. Disability News Headlines
4. New Podcast Episode: Your Child Has an IEP, Does a Miami Private School Have to Honor It?
5. Neurofriendly Employers: A County Map for the Job Search
6. A Free Trauma Therapy Program for Miami-Dade Children
7. Children and teens wanted for paid research
8. Some States Had Already Decided Who Wouldn’t Get a Ventilator: The Rule Was Your Loved One's Diagnosis

⚖️ Probate & Your Child’s Future: Live webinar with Carlos Aguila of Aguila Law and Victor Antunez

Here's a question nobody asks until a courtroom asks it for them: when a home passes through probate, what happens to the child who depends on it? The benefits, the trust, the home itself. Most families find out in the middle of it, which is the worst time to learn.

• Wednesday, November 18, 6:00 to 7:00pm ET
• Live on Zoom, bring your questions
• With attorney Carlos Aguila of Aguila Law and Victor Antunez
• What we cover: how probate touches a child’s benefits, what happens to the family home, where special needs trusts fit, and the steps that cost little before a crisis and plenty after one
• ​Register here​

👉 If you work with families, send this to the one family you thought of while reading it.

🖇️ FREE BOOK DOWNLOADS​​

1. ​​​​Future-Proofing Your Special Needs Child: Essential Legal, Financial, and Life Strategies for Florida Families​​
2. ​Miami-Dade Special Needs Resource Directory​
3. ​The Ultimate Home Buying Guide for Families with Special Needs​

Trump Accounts: The $1,000 Gift That Could Cost Your Disabled Child Their Benefits

There’s a new savings account for kids called a Trump Account, and on its face it’s a nice thing. Any child under 18 with a Social Security number can have one, families and others can put in up to $5,000 a year, and babies born between 2025 and 2028 get $1,000 in federal seed money to start. The money sits in low-cost index funds and grows. For most families, that’s a head start.

For a family raising a child with a disability, it can quietly become a problem, and the problem shows up eighteen years later when nobody’s looking.

Here’s the mechanics, and they’re not political, they’re just how the rules work. SSI and Medicaid in most states cap what a person can own at $2,000. Go over that line and the benefits stop. A Trump Account is owned by the child, and while they’re a minor it doesn’t count against that limit. But at 18 the account converts to a traditional IRA, and an IRA does count. A single $1,000 seed, left to grow for eighteen years, can reach five or six thousand dollars on its own. That alone puts a child past the $2,000 line the day they become an adult, right when they’d be applying for the SSI and Medicaid they’ll rely on.

This hits two kinds of families. The ones whose child already receives SSI, and the ones who earn too much to qualify now but whose child will apply as an adult. Both can be tripped by the same account.

There’s a fix, and it’s a good one, but it has a deadline most people won’t know to watch for. The money can be rolled into an ABLE account, which was built for exactly this. Up to $100,000 in an ABLE account doesn’t count against SSI, and the funds stay available for disability expenses like housing, transportation, and health care. The catch is timing: under current rules, that full rollover is allowed only during the calendar year the child turns 17, and when it’s done that way it isn’t capped by ABLE’s normal annual contribution limit. Miss that window and at 18 the account becomes an IRA that can no longer move into ABLE, and the only way out is to spend it down, possibly with penalties and taxes.

So if there’s a Trump Account in your child’s name, put one thing on your calendar now: roll it into an ABLE account the year they turn 17. For balances larger than ABLE can hold, a special needs trust is the next tool, and that’s a conversation worth having early rather than late. If you need a special needs attorney, I can recommend one, just call me at 305.401.6224.

This is the kind of thing that makes thirty-year planning real. A gift meant to help every child can work against a disabled one, and the difference comes down to one rollover done at the right time. You can read the full reporting here: Newsweek, and confirm the ABLE rules straight from the source at ablenrc.org.

• Trump Accounts: The American Dream starts now​
• Open an ABLE account: SAVE​

📝 Disability News Headlines

1. ​5-year-old boy with autism goes missing at recess
2. ​Autistic People Need Choices, Not Care Gaps | Opinion
3. ​Autistic people show weaker brain responses to negative feedback​
4. ​How a local nonprofit is boosting reading scores of Miami-Dade students
5. ​Making mobility fun: Entrepreneur designs cool devices for kids
6. ​When private equity came for the clinic where I worked
7. ​Working More Than 20 Hours Won’t Cost Your Special Needs Child Their Benefits
8. ​Young Woman in Wheelchair Goes Viral After Showcasing Everyday Difficulties at University of Miami Football Game.

​Spectrum Alert for missing autistic children: Florida’s alert for a missing child under 18 with autism. Call 911 right away, then MEPIC (Missing Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse) at 1-888-356-4774. Only law enforcement can activate it.

​Purple Alert for missing autistic adults: Florida’s alert for a missing adult 18 or older with autism or another cognitive, intellectual, or developmental disability. Call 911 right away, then MEPIC (Missing Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse) at 1-888-356-4774. The reporting agency requests activation.

🎧 NEW PODCAST EPISODE 🎧

Your Child Has an IEP, Does a Miami Private School Have to Honor It?

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A Free Trauma Therapy Program for Miami-Dade Children

Here’s a Miami-Dade resource worth knowing about, and it costs families nothing. FIU’s Center for Children and Families runs a Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy program for children and teens ages 3 - 17 who are carrying distress after something hard: abuse, neglect, domestic violence, grief, loss, an accident, a disaster, or witnessing any of it. A child doesn’t need a formal diagnosis to qualify. If the distress is there, they can be seen.

If you work with families, this is one to keep on hand. Forward it to the one who needs it. Call program coordinator Kristen Vazquez at 305-348-5885, or email krivazqu@fiu.edu, or call CCF (305-348-0477

👉 Program page: https://ccf.fiu.edu/families/ccf-clinic/tf-cbt/​

Children and teens wanted for paid research

​THRIVE Study at FIU's Center for Children and Families: Paid research study for families of children and teens ages 10 to 13 on social changes and brain development. Your child completes computer and social tasks while brain activity is measured, plus surveys about thoughts and feelings, with compensation up to $660 across the first 9-month and 18-month visits and $20 travel per in-person visit.

👉 Contact: thriveFIU@gmail.com or 786-305-5561 or visit https://www.fiuthrive.com/​

Some States Had Already Decided Who Wouldn’t Get a Ventilator: The Rule Was Your Loved One's Diagnosis

I'm taking the Florida Partners in Policymaking class, and I learned something I didn't want to believe until I did the research for this article.

In spring 2020, hospitals braced for more COVID patients than they had ventilators, so states pulled out their crisis plans. Those plans decide who gets a machine when there aren't enough. Most of us never knew they existed. Disability advocates did, and when they read them, they found our families.

Not by name, by diagnosis.

Alabama's plan, written in 2010 and still posted in 2020, said people with severe intellectual disability, advanced dementia, or severe brain injury "may be poor candidates for ventilator support." New York's guidelines left people who breathe with their own home ventilator afraid that if they went to the hospital, the machine could be taken and given to someone else. Pennsylvania's scoring counted long-term conditions against you, whether or not they had anything to do with surviving COVID.

Read that again. Not "this patient probably won't make it." Just: this patient has this diagnosis, move them down the list.

Advocates filed complaints with the federal Office for Civil Rights, and the federal government moved in. Alabama pulled its criteria on April 8, 2020. Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Utah followed. Complaints eventually hit 10 states, from New York to Tennessee to Texas. The federal ruling was plain: disability can't be the reason someone goes to the back of the line, and nobody's "quality of life" gets to decide who's worth saving.

Here’s where it touches us in Florida. Florida drafted state guidelines but abandoned them in 2011, and hasn’t adopted anything since. When COVID hit, a medical ethics group called the Florida Bioethics Network put out voluntary guidelines, and the Florida Hospital Association’s board endorsed them. On paper, those guidelines say disability itself can never be the reason a patient loses the machine. But when a coalition of Florida disability organizations asked the state to ban disability discrimination in rationing care, the state never answered with a rule. It still hasn’t. So if our families are protected in Florida, that protection comes from a voluntary document and the judgment of whichever doctor is standing at the bedside. Nothing in state law says otherwise.

I came into this class thinking policy meant budgets and waiting lists. It also means documents written years before an emergency. Nobody voted on these criteria. They sat there for years and became policy the moment a crisis hit.

So who stopped them? Not the states that wrote them. It was the advocates who read those documents before anyone needed them and filed the complaints that forced the changes. That's the whole thing, somebody was in the rooms, or at least reading what came out of them.

I have an autistic daughter, and I've got a new habit: when I hear about a plan, a protocol, a set of guidelines, I want to know who's in it and who gets left out. The system didn't just fail; the failure was written down ahead of time, in plain English, and almost nobody knew about it.

— Victor Antunez, autism dadvocate 🧩

Sources:

​https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/04/08/ocr-reaches-early-case-resolution-alabama-after-it-removes-discriminatory-ventilator-triaging.html​

​https://www.hhs.gov/civil-rights/for-providers/civil-rights-covid19/index.html​

​https://publicintegrity.org/health/coronavirus-and-inequality/state-policies-may-send-people-with-disabilities-to-the-back-of-the-line-for-ventilators/​

​https://www.justdigit.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/letter-to-DeSantis-re-rationing-of-health-care.pdf​

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