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Calvin G. Brown News

JAMAICA | Jamaica’s Autism Emergency, Part I: The Children the System Cannot Find

An Autism Expo in Hopewell, Hanover last Saturday drew 400 people from across Jamaica — and proved in a single afternoon what government data has long obscured: tens of thousands of children are living with autism in this country, undiagnosed, locked out of school, and invisible to the two ministries that should be fighting for them. So overwhelming was the demand that scores of families left without the diagnosis they came for. JCI Hopewell is already planning to do it again.

Part I of II — Part II: “The Foreign Diagnosis Trap and the Ministries That Must Act” publishes tomorrow.

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica,  April 14, 2026, Calvin G. Brown & Dr. Yochel Samuels-Williams - On Saturday, April 11, something quiet extraordinary happened in Hopewell, Hanover. Four hundred people — parents, teachers, caregivers, advocates, and individuals living on the autism spectrum — converged on Hopewell High School for an Autism Expo staged by JCI Jamaica through JCI Hopewell, under the sponsorship of Kingston JCI Trust and the leadership of Dr. Yochel Samuels-Williams, Immediate Past President of JCI Hopewell, formerly Hopewell Jaycees. 

Calvin G. Brown News
Dr. Yochel Samuels-Williams, Immediate Past President of JCI Hopewell, formerly Hopewell Jaycees with a parent and her child at the JCI Jamaica Autism Expo in Hopewell, Hanover.
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