THE AUTISM FIGHT.(struggle of Maryland's Regina and Dan Wagner to get desired educational programmes for their autistic children; Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children)

Regina Wagner began to realize that there was something wrong with her son Daniel when he was eight months old. He wasn't sitting or crawling, as her first child, Katie, had done at that age. Over the next year, Regina had more reasons for concern. Daniel didn't make eye contact with her or with her husband, Dan, and he didn't say Mama or Dada. Daniel's pediatrician attempted to reassure the Wagners. "Boys do things later than girls," he said. At eighteen months, Daniel said a couple of words, but he soon stopped. He did not respond to his name. He didn't like to be touched or held. He flapped his hands and feet. At the Sugar Plum Daycare Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, which he and Katie attended five days a week, Katie played joyfully with other children. Daniel remained in his own world and often bit other toddlers who came near him.

In October of 1997, three months before Daniel's second birthday, the Wagners took him to be evaluated at Georgetown University Medical Center's Child Development Center. During the evaluation, Daniel wandered around the testing room, pushing away test materials he was offered. He banged and threw blocks, instead of stacking them. Given a toy car to play with (pushing a toy car over a flat surface is considered an eight-month-level skill), he turned it upside down and spun its wheels. The testing revealed that Daniel's cognitive and behavioral difficulties were "consistent with a diagnosis of Autistic Disorder."

Parents of autistic children rarely forget the details of the day they are first given the child's diagnosis. Dan Wagner remembers asking one of the psychologists, "Are you telling me that Daniel won't be a quarterback at Harvard?" He also remembers her reply: "Well, actually, he may not graduate from high school."

Dan Wagner grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland. His father, a graduate of Harvard, was an electrical engineer; his mother was a teacher. (Both are retired.) "I'm the black sheep in my family," Dan says. "My older brother and sister are college graduates, but I dropped out of the University of Maryland to become a policeman in D.C." He married young, and has a son and daughter by his first wife. (Both children graduated from college; the son is a financial planner, the daughter a film director.) Dan, a tall, lean man of fifty-six with a full head of gray hair, is a homicide detective sergeant. He supervises a group of younger detectives, and his work hours are demanding and always changing.

Regina, a pleasant-looking woman of thirty-eight with brown hair and brown eyes, was raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side. While attending law school at Catholic University, in Washington, she worked as a part-time law clerk at the United States Attorney's office, and met Dan when they worked together on a case. "I never liked dating men my age," she says. After Regina and Dan were married, she took a job as an assistant state's attorney for Montgomery County, where they settled.

The Wagners' third child, Grace, was born a few weeks before Daniel's evaluation at Georgetown; she was a much easier baby than Katie (who had been clingy) and Daniel (whom Regina described as "a lump" during his first few months). Grace looked directly at her parents and smiled. She crawled early and walked early. At twelve months, however, she still wasn't speaking. Three months later, she, too, was given a diagnosis of autism.

Diagnosis --