Here is the text of the letter I sent Federal Communications Chairman Tom Wheeler, who says he pays particular attention to comments from the public about net neutrality. If you have a personal story about net neutrality to share with the chair, click on the Kos campaign link below:
http://campaigns.dailykos.com/...
Dear Chairman Wheeler,
Fifteen years ago, I was a terrified mother of a beautiful preschooler who had lost his ability to speak and play and who no longer seemed to know when his father and I were present. I turned to the Web, where quite by chance I stumbled on information about a then-obscure method for teaching children with autism called Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). That was how net neutrality benefited my child in 1998 when few parents or special educators even knew ABA existed.
Over the next few years, parents began to blog about their children’s experiences with ABA. As word spread among parents of children with autism, so did requests for ABA special education programs. ABA grew from a little-known method into a standard practice in many parts of this country. Since then, I have seen the effect of ABA on nonverbal toddlers who spent their days rocking back and forth, screaming for hours at a time, unable to speak or engage with other children or their own families. Today, some of the children I know are attending middle school. They are completely mainstreamed, require no special education services and will be as employable as their peers when they become adults. That is the story of how net neutrality benefited hundreds of thousands of children once considered beyond help.
Losing net neutrality would mean losing the only path to under-publicized information. Who can say what the next widespread educational, healthcare or environmental breakthrough might be? If we lose net neutrality, we'll never know how many struggling learners, sick patients, polluted communities could be saved.
That would be a shame.
Sincerely,
Audrey Rasmusson