July 7, 2026 — Tallahassee
My son is 21. He has profound autism. He will never be able to drive, and he cannot navigate public transportation. For the past two years, a driver from a local provider called iEnable has picked him up at our front door, Monday through Friday, and taken him to the Leon County Schools ACE Transition Program — drivers who know him, door to door, there and back. The program is teaching him the skills that could one day make him self-sufficient — or at least let him find a job, and purpose.
The ride cost our family three dollars.
On July 1, it stopped.
Not because the van broke down, or the driver quit, or the program failed. It stopped because of a single line on page 13 of a veto list: item 2054-1, the Innovative Service Development Grant Program, $6 million — struck from Florida’s budget on June 29. The service that carried my son and 88 other riders in our corner of the state — most of them adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, none of them with another way to get where they were going — had, in its last completed budget year, delivered nearly 10,000 rides and spent 100 percent of its funding. I’ve laid out those records, with sources, in the companion article. This one is about what a line item looks like from inside a family.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to: the ride is the access. Without it, there is no program. Nobody vetoed the transition program. Nobody had to.
The cliff every special needs parent knows is coming
If you’re raising a younger child with a disability, here is the thing nobody tells you early enough: the school bus is a countdown clock. Federal law guarantees your child transportation to school services — until the school years end. In Florida that’s age 22. After that, there is no bus. There is no guaranteed anything. There is whatever your county happens to have — and a parent with car keys.
The ISD-funded service was the answer to that cliff in our community. And this is the part I tried to explain in my letters to the state, because I don’t believe it was visible when the veto decision was made: this isn’t parents rushing their kids to band practice and baseball games. These are older adults managing transportation for their adult children as well as for themselves.
What the ride actually paid for
The service gave me the peace of mind that my son was safe and where he needed to be, so that I could focus on running my business — which is what provides for him. His program and my work are on opposite sides of town. Without the ride, I cut back my work every single weekday to drive him — and the work I’m cutting is the very thing that has to provide for him after I’m gone, for the rest of his life.
That’s the trade the veto forced on the families of the 89 riders our service carried in its last completed year, and it’s why I want every reader who found this site through a trust question to see this story as connected to that one: the plan we all build — the trust, the savings, the benefits — runs on parents being able to work. A vanished $3 ride reaches all the way into that plan. And families like ours are the reason the math works for the state, too — family caregivers keeping our adult children cared for at home save Florida enormous sums compared to the alternatives. This program was part of what made that possible.
What we did, and what you can do
When the provider told rider families the funding had been vetoed, they asked us to write to the state’s transportation-disadvantaged ombudsman. I did — and to our state representative, our state senator, and the governor’s office, asking them to fight to restore the funding in the next budget and to support anything that can keep riders moving in the meantime. I don’t know yet whether any of it moves anything. The Commission that runs the program meets September 17, in Tallahassee, with public comment on the agenda, and its minutes from June should tell us more about what was about to be funded when the veto landed.
What I know is that this program’s riders are, almost by definition, the Floridians least able to show up in Tallahassee and advocate for themselves. Their families can. If yours is one of them — or if you’re a Florida family whose child will someday reach the cliff at 22 — here is exactly who to contact, what to cite, and when the public meetings are.
I started this website because I’m a parent who had to learn a complicated system the hard way, and I didn’t want other families to learn it alone. I never planned to write news. But this happened to my family, it’s happening to families across the state, and as of today no news outlet has covered it. So we will.
— Randy Smith is a special needs father in Tallahassee and the publisher of SpecialNeedsTrustByState.com. His family used the ISD-funded Wakulla-Leon service for two years. Facts about the program and veto are documented in the companion article.