Nebraska Olmstead Plan Survey

There is still time to take the survey for partners, advocates, and workgroup members regarding Nebraska’s Olmstead Plan. Feedback is being used to identify successes with the Plan as well as potential areas of improvement.

Sharing your input and opinions would be greatly appreciated!

The survey takes about 5-10 minutes. Your responses will be kept confidential, meaning any identifying information about you will be removed from any reporting. The survey will be kept open until March 16, 2024.

National Updates

The Autism Society of America provided joint comments to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee in response to a request regarding co-occuring conditions with autism. You can read these comments here.

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health recently had a hearing featuring many bills that are related to health and disability, including the Autism Cares Act (H.R. 7213) and the Lifespan Respite Care Act (H.R. 6160). The Autism Society of America supports reauthorizing both of these pieces of legislation, and you can read a policy brief from the Autism Society and the Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD) regarding the Autism Cares Act here.

Learn here how the federal government is taking steps to help support direct support professionals that provide care for disabled individuals.

Nebraska Updates

Senators have chosen their priority bills. These bills are most likely to make progress this session (due to the short nature of this session).

Priority legislation that may impact Autistic individuals and their families include:

LB937 Adopt the Caregiver Tax Credit Act 

Introduced by Senator Bostar as his priority legislation. It is still in committee and has had its initial committee hearing. If you are interested in seeing this bill move out of committee you can contact the revenue committee and ask them to move it to the floor of the legislature for debate. You can find the revenue committee members here.

LB71 Change provisions relating to parental involvement in and access to learning materials in schools. This is a bill from last session that has been chosen as priority legislation and provides requirements for school districts to provide access to curriculum, assessments, and requests to exclude students from participating in certain educational programs including learning material, testing, guest speaker events, etc. A new amendment from Senator Conrad includes provisions to allow students to repeat grades if they have over 50% absenteeism.