Introducing myself

Hi,
I am the second team member of the blog. I have had CFS for decades and fortunately have never been terribly ill with it. I have a child with autism also. Having been a nurse for many years I have watched the numbers of children with autism rise from very rare to very common. I do think that children are being diagnosed who would not have been years ago, but that only explains some of the increase. What we did not have, but surely have now, are the numbers of children with severe autism.
When I was in school (the olden days as my younger daughter likes to say) we had one classroom of kids with special needs. I knew those kids and none of them had autism. There was one school in New York City that I found out about in college that was for children with autism. I made a visit there and I had never seen children like those kids. Autism was a very rare condition. It is now four decades later. Does anyone know of a public school that does not have a classroom for children with autism? What metropolitan area does not have schools just for autism both public and private?
I met my first child with a spectrum disorder when I was in Graduate School now I recently read that one in every ten boys have ADHD. If this occurred with any other disease process it would be called an epidemic. Epidemics concern me.